English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Let’s suppose we have the following excerpt:
Which of those three variants is correct?
I'm confused by commit as a noun because no dictionary claims it is. But it is used pretty often as a noun in the computer-related texts.
commitment has many definitions, including "the act of committing" and "the state of being committed". But "how the target DB engine handles data commitment" doesn't sound natural to me. Consider as an alternative phrase "the commitment of the crime was late on a Saturday night" - this sounds similarly wrong to my ear. So I don't like Option 1, though I can't prove that it is incorrect.
commit is apparently not a noun. However it is, as you point out, frequently used as one in the computing world. So Option 2 is not grammatically correct, but it sounds perfectly normal to my ear, and would probably be widely accepted in a computing environment.
Option 3 is getting beyond my knowledge of theoretical grammar. It sounds wrong to me. But, considering an equivalent phrase: "Let's see how Steve handles John beating him at snooker", it sounds fine. So probably Option 3 is completely grammatically correct.
So, what would I do? I'd go for a completely different noun derived from commit - I would use committal.
how the target DB engine handles data committal
All links courtesy of dictionary.reference.com
I worked for a database company for three years and I most frequently heard the word used as a noun, something like this:
In this case, "a commit" is understood to be a piece of data that has been written to memory/disk or similar. Hence I would say that your second option would become
The verb form which you have listed in 1 and 3 was not something I heard as often, but when I did hear it used, it was usually in the third form you listed above, that is: "committing". I don't think I have ever heard anyone use the first version you listed (commitment) in conversation.
Personally, I think that the reason it sounds odd to me is simply because commitment is a term more frequently used to describe the human capability to commit to a task, person, job rather than a technical term. However, in the right context I would have no problem understanding the terms as it pertains to databases.
With that anecdotal, personal evidence out of the way, I will note that searching for "data committing" and "data commitment" in a database context in Google returns plenty of relevant results. In fact data commitment returns twice the number of results. Hence both terms are clearly used as verbs and are acceptable as such.
In computer terms, a commit is a command. It says take all the edits I have been doing and make them permanent. But you do not commit something, you do a commit. It's a key distinction. The verb is not "to commit." It's "to do a commit."
If you are describing what happens behind the scenes when you use the commit command, you can talk about committing data.
