idempotent writes

idempotent writes

Posted May 16, 2008 18:18 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
Parent article: Getting a handle on caching

Writes have to be idempotent (writing the same value to the same location several times has the same effect as writing it once).

Though that's a common usage, that's not really what idempotent means. In this context, idempotent means the write has no effect. So the goal is for the second write to be idempotent, but not the first.

"Repeatable" is a better word for something that can be done several times with the same effect as doing it once.

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