[Swift-devel] external datasets

[Mihael Hategan]

On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 23:08 +0000, Ben Clifford wrote:
> On Tue, 27 May 2008, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> 
> > It should theoretically be able to handle restarts properly, no?
> 
> With a variable-based restart mechanism, I think it will remember that the 
> variable has been closed. With filename-based restarts, I think no.

Right.

> 
> Perhaps restarting might bring up the same kind of problems as replication 
> and retries - if some data processing got half-way through and then 
> abandoned/broken/whatever, the various things Swift does to make 
> application execution appear atomic wrt application output files won't 
> happen here.
> 

Also right. All we can do there is allow user-defined "compensation
handlers".