in reply to Re^2: Perl Typeless Database
in thread Perl Typeless Autovivifying Database
I would not want any of my database programs to have a data collection average of even a Hall of Fame baseball player. A Ted Williams program, for example, would get its data less than 40% of the time.
UDP is, in of itself, unreliable. But programs using it are not necessarily so. Would you use unreliable NFS? I doubt it, but NFS uses UDP. But it also uses RPC, which has a request/reply protocol that allows for retransmissions should a reply not arrive within a specified window. Other UDP applications (e.g., video or audio streaming) may allow a certain level of loss because they know that some percentage of dropped packets will be undetectable by the human using the application. The key is that they have methods they can use within, or layered above, the UDP protocol (e.g., sequence numbers) that allow the receiver to monitor and detect the (un)reliability of the underlying UDP protocol.
Reliability/speed tradeoffs are acceptable for services but the (un)reliability has to be detectable.