Managed World

Andrew recently watched my screencasts and had some great questions that came up around how Transactional NTFS behaves with the file system. So, I figured I would answer them here. So, if you want to see the context around his questions, check out his post.

Here's the paragraph with the questions:

I wonder what happens to files that never get committed - ala a long running transaction. They have to be taking up file space. Jason says not even Windows Explorer knows about them, but they have to exist somewhere. What if they overflow? Is there a way to clean house? If the poop is invisible, does it still stink?

Great observations and questions Andrew! In the case of a long running, open transaction, the files will exist on the disk. Hence, they are certainly taking up space on the disk. If you have 256 MB of free space on your disk, and try to write 257 MB of data to the disk within a transaction, you will get an "out of space" error like you would outside of a transaction.

Is there a way to clean house? Yes, rollback or commit the transaction. On rollback, any changes made within the transaction are rolled back, and then consequently removed form the disk.

But what if my server crashes in the middle of a transaction. Would I have turds floating around the file system? No, you would not. When an NTFS-formatted volume is mounted in Vista or Windows Server "Longhorn", any transactions that are "in-doubt" (the transaction manager is no longer around and we have no clue on the status of the transaction) will be rolled back automatically, effectively removing all the changes from disk. So, in that sense, you would not have any file turds you have to clean up after a system crash (like you would have if you were doing a "temp file -> rename" type of methodology.

Now, as is usual in transaction systems, you have to be _very_ aware and _very_ cautious of long-running transactions as it could cause some long-term problems that you don't want to deal with. So, there certainly are scenarios where Transactional NTFS just is not a good fit. As tends to be the case with all technology, make sure you are using the right tool for the right job :).