I remember writing documentation for a Perl system in 2001 - it was using MySQL MyISAM tables and the main developer had a few hundred thousand lines of Perl that acted as the same kind of client attempt at transactions. It was a mess and huge amounts of money were spent on trying to get the thing to work. A few months later InnoDB came along and made it apparent that trying to write transaction logic in the client was a very bad idea, which seems to be the point of this article.