backend-sql, network hacks

[linas@linas.org]

It's been rumoured that Christopher Browne said:
> 
> The thing I'm even more curious about is how this might be expected to
> affect balance management; a scheme has been outlined to provide a
> pretty efficient way of avoiding reading _too_ much data from DBMS
> when working with account balances.  It seems to me to be a pretty
> nasty one to try to maintain as a set of triggers that would sit on
> the DBMS side.

I have concluded that its difficult to the point of impossible to 
maintain triggers that automaticlly add up account balances. 
It may be possible to do this with stored proceedures, but my lack of
familiarity with this makes me shy away.

ergo, the answer seems to be to implement account balances with
'checkpoints', with all respinsibility for adding number happeing on
the client side.  Any nominations for a more elagent single-word name 
than "account balance checkpoint"  ? abc?

--linas