51–60 of 66 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rows in the database are never updated or deleted. Only new rows are added.
A blockchain could be used to enforce that immutability. Which might be an actual, useful application for blockchains.
Yes, and surprisingly the implementation is called Bitcoin ;)
So, approach this space with a healthy dose of skepticism until its been appropriately vetted and certified by third party auditors.
Updating the current balance of big merchants, which are receiving multiple payments per second seems to create a lot of lost transactions, with the locking of the balance.
That would generate deadlocks in RDBMSs, curious to know if Spanner is able to scale it.
I built a similar system using DynamoDB and optimistic locking, and for that I had to remove concurrency of updates in the same document, meaning you can get ˜30 updates of the same document per second, with each update taking ˜30 milliseconds.
This looks good but some of the background has the air of the kind of artificial problems presented in late night infomercials: > It’s impossible to split a single payment into multiple payouts, since there is a many-to-one relationship of payments to payouts. So your model used a many-to-one relationship when you really wanted a many-to-many? > Since this is just a SQL database, there’s nothing preventing the payout…
I think this mocking of their intention and problem statements is misplaced. > So your model used a many-to-one relationship when you really wanted a many-to-many? In many schema discussions you’d be right, but in the case of payments systems it’s not the case. Payments and payouts are separate transactions and only loosely related. The allocation of credit from one leads to an increment in the settlement of the othe…
Constraints can be more than referential integrity. When PostgreSQL released transition tables, I built a very small proof-of-concept using them to constrain a double-entry (-like) system. https://github.com/jimktrains/pgdea allows any number of debits and credits in a transaction, but the whole transaction must have a 0 balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like something internal...I don't think developers or typical small businesses need (or would want to!) to store their double-entry accounting database in shards across Google Cloud Spanner & Kubernetes clusters... Good luck with your application -- I, for one, think there's a need for it. I've wished for years that someone would put something like a secure, web-based Gnucash out into the world.
Doesn't necessarily need to be hosted, although given that people are fine with running Quickbooks or any other SaaS it's hard to see why they wouldn't be fine with ledger SaaS. Can still make a case for licensing, though, depending on the features. We built this for our internal accounting, it's a ledger service that enforced immutable double entry rules and can run as a container with a Postgres DB configured. http…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like something internal...I don't think developers or typical small businesses need (or would want to!) to store their double-entry accounting database in shards across Google Cloud Spanner & Kubernetes clusters... Good luck with your application -- I, for one, think there's a need for it. I've wished for years that someone would put something like a secure, web-based Gnucash out into the world.
Doesn't necessarily need to be hosted, although given that people are fine with running Quickbooks or any other SaaS it's hard to see why they wouldn't be fine with ledger SaaS. Can still make a case for licensing, though, depending on the features. We built this for our internal accounting, it's a ledger service that enforced immutable double entry rules and can run as a container with a Postgres DB configured. http…
Personally, I'm likely to stick with Gnucash until or unless it becomes completely unsupported, but Intuit needs some real competition and it would be great to have more choice available.
gledger looks like a neat project, will check it out!
Nice article, I'd be curious to know if/how their engine abstracts the complexity behind multi-currency transactions, or whether they rely on the accounting model to handle multi-currency. We built our own double-entry accounting engine at my previous company, and while the engine was not as fancy as what Square describes, the real challenge was building out the accounting models that manipulated the engine's primiti…
Damn that link is amazing for accounting
Ask the same programmer to write an invoicing & payments system, then coupon creation and track its claims, then something where users can recharge their phone, and their usage is tracked and balance is computed -- and each one of them will be a set of ad-hoc tables and custom code. But most transactional systems where things move from one entity to another and has the notion of "balance value" is best represented by…
So other accounting software provides mutable ? Square are you serious? Just adding a authentication layer over it and calling immutable
Basically, it’s just a list of transactions you can only append to. You can’t delete any of the entries or modify them - they really are immutable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rows in the database are never updated or deleted. Only new rows are added.
A blockchain could be used to enforce that immutability. Which might be an actual, useful application for blockchains.