[whartung]

Switching from a "raw" b-tree system to an SQL system with transactions was an eye opening experience.

The typical troubleshooting path with the b-tree system almost inevitably, and very quickly, led to a "rebuild the indexes" process which no one enjoyed.

The transactions on the SQL system pretty much eliminated that error path completely. Only actual on disk file corruption would lead to trouble. We could always (and did) post wrong data to the DB, but the DB did what it was told (right or wrong), but having the indexes lose sync with the as records was never a problem.

Its hard to describe how refreshing that was.

I'm sure there were b-tree systems with in built transaction systems to keep the base rows in sync with the indexes, but they were pretty late to the game and the SQL DBs started taking over.