ACIDity and Qian Wang

I actually wanted to put up a philosophical post, but I have way too much going on right now to feel philosophical. I need to relax. R. E. L. A. X. I am sorely tempted to elicit some sympathy by listing out all the things I need to be getting done. I shall not. Why bug you poor souls also??

1. I have been spending the weekend poring over assorted books. For a database to be of any practical use it needs to have the ACID property over transactions performed on it.

Atomicity : A transaction is an atomic unit of processing. It is either performed entirely or not.
Consistency : A transaction is should be consistency preserving. It's complete execution should go from one consistent state to another.
Isolation : That is, the execution of a transaction should not be interfered with by any other transactions executing concurrently.
Durability : A commited transaction should not be lost. Durability is ensured through the use of transaction logs that facilitate the restoration of committed transactions in spite of any subsequent failures.

Boring no. Now do this - replace transaction with relationship. Big word. I feel very uncomfortable using it. Anyway, he he he. Now read it again. The perfect manual. Short. Succint. Simple. Can be (and should be) taught to every 6th standard kid. The final result - 80% reduction in teenage, middle age and old age angst, 70% reduction in quarter-life and mid-life crises - worldwide. The world IS a happier more beautiful place. It can be called Ramani's ACID Rule. You can put things to the ACID test. Since it's my rule, the RA(N)CID test. Hope it doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.

2. Have you noticed Chinese names. They are short. Chen. Liu. Wang. I think it's a very bad design idea. Try mistyping Subramaniam Anantharamakrishnan. What are the chances that you are going to create another valid name? akjaklsdj lkjasdklfjklasdjf. Now mistype Wang - Yang, Lang, Qang - all very plausible names. See, this creates huge problems.

Assuming you want to name your kid, and you tell the guy in the registrar office, your kids name, he mistypes, and instead of Qian Wang you have Qian Yang. It's a valid name. So, later you notice - oops mistake - and you cannot even tell the guy to change it. He will be like - "What, this name valid is. What you say. You me cheat". That was a lame imitation. Apologies.

I was thinking, there would be about 10,000 possible names with 5 letters. In a population of 1.5 billion, about 150000 people will share the same name. Assuming some names are more popular (which mean money, or wisdom or useful things like that), there is potential for almost a million people to share the same name. Do you know what that means?? It's horrendous searching for a guy on the net. It's time for them to increase the address space. They should be a convention where they decide to give everyone longer names. Consciously.

Note : No Chinese were offended in the creation of this joke. I quite like them actually. IF I could pronounce those names. You could learn to here.

Explanatory notes :D :D :

2) Try mistyping Subramaniam Anantharamakrishnan. What are the chances that you are going to create another valid name?

What I am saying is that if the name is long there is not a much of a chance for a mistype to lead you to another real person. But with short names, not so much. I can make a more 'profound' explanation, but it would scare everyone away. God knows why I am writing such geeky stuff. Maybe the semester has started and there is more geeky stuff occupying mindspace.

It's time for them to increase the address space. They should be a convention where they decide to give everyone longer names.

This is a terrible one. It's a take on the IPv6 convention when the internet was running out of doman addresses. So, they lengthened the length of each address so that there was enough for everyone. :D