WHY use anything other than an XML backend?

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Wed Apr 20 15:59:01 EDT 2011


On Apr 20, 2011, at 11:30 AM, Andy Den Tandt wrote:

>>> It would be interesting to know how
>>> frequently users resort to the close-without-saving feature using XML. 
>> Almost never.
> 
> I revert my changes whenever I am trying something out. Eg create new
> account tree and see how that works out; ... But that can easily be achieved
> by opening the real DB and saving to a test DB.
> 
> Which brings me to another question: what prevents me from switching to the
> new backend; using that for a while to see how it goes; and then switching
> back to XML? How bad is the 'data loss for a few new features' that was
> mentioned a few posts ago?

Nothing at all prevents it. Everything round-trips correctly; I tested that extensively last November and December.

The data-loss problem with the SQL backend occurs with the automatic matching of transactions to accounts when importing, either through online banking or with a separately downloaded file. The matching history is kept in a structure that isn't transactional, so it isn't committed to the database automatically and it doesn't mark the book as dirty: It assumes that writing the transaction will do that, which is a bad assumption with the SQL backend. The work-around is to do a Save As after importing; you can overwrite your existing database if you want (it does a safe save, moving the original data out of the way, then writing the new data, and finally deleting the old data, so there's no risk of a data loss if you crash in the middle).

Regards,
John Ralls



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list