bcquality/microsoft/knowledge/performance/avoid-commit-inside-loops.md
Jesper Schulz-Wedde 62dabf9a11 Co-locate AL samples next to their knowledge articles
The /samples/ top-level tree is replaced with sibling files in each
knowledge-layer folder. An article and its demonstrations now live
side-by-side:

  microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.md
  microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.good.al
  microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.bad.al

Rationale:
- Proximity. An article and its paired samples are one unit; the
  filesystem now reflects that.
- Layer ownership. Samples inherit layer precedence for free -- a
  /custom/ fork can override an article and its samples atomically,
  which the shared /samples/ tree previously made awkward.
- Trivial migration path. Action-skill source globs
  (*/knowledge/<domain>/**/*.md) are unchanged; sample discovery is a
  sibling-filename lookup.

Changes:
- git mv of all 65 sample files from samples/<domain>/<slug>/{bad,good}.al
  to microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/<slug>.{bad,good}.al (history preserved).
- Update See-sample references in all 37 articles that ship samples.
- skills/read.md: replace the no-code-blocks bullet with a pointer to a
  new Sample files section that fully specifies the sibling convention,
  the kinds (good/bad + forward-compatible), multi-technology rules,
  demonstration-only status, and layer-precedence behaviour.
- skills/write.md: update the samples pointer to match.
- README.md: annotate the knowledge tree with the sample sibling shape.
- samples/README.md deleted; content lifted into skills/read.md.
- Both generators (C:\temp\gen_performance_knowledge.py,
  C:\temp\gen_security_knowledge.py) updated to emit at the new paths
  and to stop writing samples/README.md. Re-running them is idempotent
  against the committed layout.

Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
2026-04-17 13:45:33 +02:00

1.3 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
26..28
performance
commit
loop
transaction
lock
al
w1
all

Do not Commit inside loops

Seed article. Converted from an existing performance-review prompt to bootstrap the BCQuality performance corpus. Domain stewards should expand, restructure, and refine as needed.

Description

Commit ends the current transaction. Calling it inside a loop produces one transaction per iteration and loses the ability to roll back the whole operation atomically. It also interferes with the platform's ability to batch write operations. The original motivation — releasing locks during a long batch — is better served by splitting the batch into explicit checkpoints that each process a bounded number of rows.

Best Practice

If the batch is large enough that a single transaction is untenable, process it in checkpoints driven by an outer loop that each time picks up the next N rows. Commit once per checkpoint at a clearly defined safe boundary, not inside the per-row loop.

Anti Pattern

Placing Commit inside repeat ... until Next() = 0 is almost always a mistake: it is unusual for the correctness of the operation to depend on per-row commits, and the cost of starting a new transaction on every row dominates the work.

See sample: avoid-commit-inside-loops.bad.al.