Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!emory!hubcap!vasu
From: vasu@client3.cs.psu.edu (Vasu Nori)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Linda VS Databases
Message-ID: <13363@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 91 19:50:12 GMT
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I am trying to define what a stable storage scheme for tuple space should 
be, in the face of process failures. Would anybody care to comment on
the following :

As far as concurrency control problem in Linda is concerned, it seems to be
almost same as a distributed database concurrency control problem. Since 
the linda has fewer operations defined on the tuple space than does a
database environment, achieving concurrency control seems simpler too.

In fact, by regarding each tuple as an independent piece of information,
(i.e., it doesn't directly affect any other tuple by its deletion or insertion
into the tuple space) there is no need to define any serializability
criteria across workers. Of course, this limits usage of linda to some
applications. But probably it is not good for applications that require
inter worker constraints (might introduce too many deadlocks anyway)

So, in other words, linda is good for one-tuple-one-task kind of applications.
anything more - a distributed-database environment will come into play.

cheers,
Vasu