Richard Pajerski Software development and consulting

Among the areas getting attention in the upcoming release of Domino 10 is the data store.  As part of making Domino more bullet-proof, removing the 64GB limit on the NSF size is planned and will be a fantastic improvement.  Naturally, this is going to put more emphasis on overall database scalability.  As Domino gets more scalable, I think it's going to need a feature that many of us have been seeking for some time: multi-document ACID transactions.

Being able to save two or more documents as a single transaction cannot currently be done natively in Domino.  The best we can get is saving all of the fields associated with a single document using NotesDocument.Save: the operation either succeeds or fails.  This is fine for most Notes/Domino applications but there are a number of cases where having a transactional save across multiple documents is desirable.  A simple work order system where multiple, related tasks are attached to a main work order request is an obvious example.  Implementing each task as a separate document is an intuitive approach and can simplify programming of such a system.

MongoDB 4.0 recently introduced multi-document transactions.  And although Domino doesn't directly compete with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases, as it begins to scale, it's nonetheless going to need to act more like them.

What do you think?