December 1999
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
13h 38m
English
The team that designed the NFS protocol consciously omitted file locking operations. Although simple file operations like READ and WRITE could be generalized across different operating systems, there was no clear consensus on what should constitute a general file and record locking protocol. In 1984, Bill Joy, one of the architects of the NFS protocol, replied to a question on the omission of file locking:
When we started the company [Sun Microsystems, Inc.] I went around and talked to the people I respect the most who were doing databases, and asked them well, if I gave you this and I gave you that . . . first of all, what would you want and if I gave you this or that would you use it . . . and it was very ...