3 ms·

I mean, if your argument is that banks don't use the primitives of a standard RDBMS because their needs aren't serviced by a standard RDBMS, of course it's a ba

I mean, if your argument is that banks don't use the primitives of a standard RDBMS because their needs aren't serviced by a standard RDBMS, of course it's a bad example because you're talking about how to do something in SQL which isn't done in SQL. But that's not a "bank accounts" problem, that's a "how banks with a non trivial number of systems work" problem. If you were implementing a system for managing bank accounts in a single RDBMS, regular transactions would work.

ludston 3y ago
The problem is that the industry standard of banking is eventually consistent. Whilst having atomic transactions is necessary, it's not sufficient: Using banks as a teaching metaphor for RDBMS systems is like using animals as a teaching metaphor for polymorphism. From a naive point of view it works, but it does more harm than good because students walk away thinking that they have a solution to a problem that isn't actually sufficient for it.