[erlang-questions] mnesia sync_transactions not fsynced?

[Dan Gudmundsson]

The only guarantee you have is that complete commits will be written to disc.

I.e. if you do several operations inside your transaction, either all
of them or none
will be save to that disc (or at least read).

/Dan

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 1:17 PM, Emile Joubert <emile@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> The docs for mnesia:sync_transactions say that it will wait until data
> have been committed and logged to disk (if disk is used). (R14B04)
>
> That appears not to be the case, as a test script illustrates. Repeated
> execution of the script (containing paired writes and deletes) should
> leave an empty table, but every so often the database starts up
> non-empty, indicating that a previous delete was not recorded on disk.
>
> Inserting "disk_log:sync(latest_log)" seems to work around the problem
> in the single-node case, but doesn't help when multiple nodes are
> involved. What is the recommended approach to guarantee that
> transactions are on disk, in both single and multiple node situations?
>
> A previous message on this list appears to indicate that transactions
> cannot be made safe in the way that I need:
> http://erlang.2086793.n4.nabble.com/Mnesia-disk-logging-and-synchronous-disk-logging-td2087144.html
> Is that information still accurate?
>
>
>
> -Emile
>
>
>
>
>
> ---- 8< ----- 8< ----- 8< ----- 8< ----- 8< ----- 8< ----- 8< -----
> #!/usr/bin/env escript
> %%! -sname testnode -mnesia debug verbose
>
> -record(testrec, {id, val=''}).
>
> main([]) ->
>    main(["200"]);
> main([Arg]) ->
>    mnesia_setup(),
>    Ids = mnesia:dirty_select(testtab,
>                             [{#testrec{id='$1',val='_'},[],['$1']}]),
>    io:format("~w entries found: ~w~n", [length(Ids), Ids]),
>    runtest(list_to_integer(Arg)).
>
> mnesia_setup() ->
>    mnesia:create_schema([node()]),
>    mnesia:start(),
>    mnesia:create_table(testtab,
>                        [{disc_copies, [node()]},
>                         {record_name, testrec},
>                         {attributes, record_info(fields, testrec)}]),
>    mnesia:wait_for_tables([testtab], 1000).
>
> runtest(0) ->
>    %disk_log:sync(latest_log),
>    halt();
> runtest(N) ->
>    mnesia:sync_transaction(
>        fun () -> mnesia:write(testtab, #testrec{id = N}, write) end),
>    mnesia:sync_transaction(fun () -> mnesia:delete({testtab, N}) end),
>    runtest(N-1).
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>