Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend

[Derek Atkins]

David <dgpickett at aol.com> writes:

> So, it is an in-RAM app, with a big save?  The C++ and JAVA container objects
> lure one in that direction, along with virtual memory and large modern RAM.

For XML-backed instances, yes.  For SQL-backed instances GnuCash does do
incremental writes as you commit, but it does NOT go to the DB on reads.

> Any chance it will grow up and use an RDBMS more normally?  When I hit enter,
> I expect the transaction left behind to be committed to disk, but instead the
> save button lights up!  There is not any auto-save, either.  No rollback

Yep.  See above.  There is a long-term plan to make it more DB-friendly,
but GnuCash started without SQL support so the first step was to get it
to use a DB like it uses XML, and then later migrate into being more of
a DB app.  SQLite didn't exist 15-20 years ago when GnuCash was starting
out, and Joe Average User does not have the knowledge to deploy and
manage MySQL or PG.

> button, either.    Why the failure to write?

Because XML isn't random-write, you have to write out the whole
document.

-derek


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com>
> To: David <dgpickett at aol.com>
> Cc: janssens-geert <janssens-geert at telenet.be>; gnucash-user
> <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Sent: Wed, Nov 6, 2013 4:09 pm
> Subject: Re: Automatic price quotes & PostgreSQL backend
>
> On Wed, November 6, 2013 3:56 pm, David wrote:
>> No, I am xml, I just extended a related topic.  With SQL, there would not
>> need to be locks outside the transactional ones of the RDBMS.
>
> You would think so, but you would be wrong.
>
> GnuCash loads all data into Core Memory at start time and runs it out of
> there.  It does a full "database lock" to prevent a second instance from
> writing into the database because the first instance would never see the
> changes.
>
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available