Synchronicity

I've been reading a little bit about ADO. Something that has always been confusing to me, though I don't think it is that complicated of a concept, is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous operations. Because of the confusion, I'm taking the time to write out the definitions, in hopes that it will burn it into my long term memory. In a nutshell--

Asynchronous Operation: An operation that returns control to the calling code prior to completing.

Synchronous Operation: An operation that does not return control to the calling code until it completes.

These are somewhat simplistic definitions, but there are many different domains that use this terminology, and the generic definitions above seem to capture the essence. The definitions seem somewhat counter intuitive to me. Synchronous implies running together and concurrency. However, it is the synchronous operation that prevents any calling operation from running at the same time. With asynchronous operations, there can be parallel processing, at least from a logical perspective. Oh well. The etymology is not important, as long as I can remember which is which.

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