Flushing single or grouped transactions

You can choose your recovery point in UltraLite by delaying committed transaction flushes. When UltraLite releases the commit to storage, the recovery point helps control when a subset of SQL statements in a transaction triggers additional operational overhead.

By default, UltraLite uses an operational-based default that flushes individual transactions to storage immediately upon a commit. For some deployments, these frequent operations can be excessive and limit the amount of transaction throughput. To reduce the performance expense caused by this default, you may choose a state-based approach. Especially for applications that rely on autocommit operations, this approach delays the additional overhead required to flush the committed transactions to storage:

On checkpoint You can set your own checkpoint, and then use it to release the work performed over the course of time. You can use as many checkpoints as you require, either within a single transaction or over multiple transactions.
Grouped You can choose a transaction count threshold and/or a timeout threshold to release the work performed.

Delaying commit flushes based on state yields better performance and a cleaner application design because applications are not required to wait for a response from UltraLite. By delaying commit flushes you also minimize the exposure to transactions by giving more granular control over data for which work has not been fully completed. For example, in a sales application, an order may be available to a second application before all items have been added or even approved.

However, it is important for you to take into account the recoverability of a transaction for which commit flushes have been delayed. Transactions that have not been released cannot be recovered. Therefore, you need to evaluate the tradeoff between the data integrity of your application and its performance.

Flushing single or grouped transactions

See also