On 18 Mar 2009, at 13:54, Jason T. Greene wrote:

Manik Surtani wrote:
On 17 Mar 2009, at 20:33, Jason T. Greene wrote:
Brian Stansberry wrote:

However, this sounds like a problem with PFER. If someone calls PFER, I think the original transaction should resync the node snapshot.
How would this be done? AFAIK the application has no control over the data in JBCs transaction context.

The PFER implementation, not the application, would just drop the node from the tx context which invoked pfer. That would mean that any subsequent read would fetch the most current data.
No, that is not correct.  PFER suspends ongoing TXs and runs outside of any TX, to prevent a failure rolling back the TX.  And this is the root of the problem.

"correctness" I think is in the eye of the beholder :)

To me it does not seem correct that i can do

pfer(k, 7)
get(k) == null

The above would only happen if you did:

tx.start() // ensure this in a transactional context
assert get(k) == null // initially empty
pfer(k, 7) // this *always* happens outside of the context of a tx
assert get(k) == null // this still holds true since we initially read this as a null.

Anyway, this pattern has nothing to do with the problem at hand, or the correctness/consistency I discussed, which has to do with handling a remove() on a null entry with repeatable read.

Cheers
--
Manik Surtani
Lead, JBoss Cache