We have a hybrid web application integrating a MySql db with Plone (last upgrade was to Plone 4.0), using collective.tin, collective.lead and SqlAlchemy.
Ok, I know that collective.tin never was released and collective.lead has been superseded; however all things work (almost) perfectly since a few years.
Recently we experienced a very strange behaviour and are looking for help in order to understand it.
Among others, we have 2 Plone content types, say A and B, defined by subclassing collective.tin, and the corresponding innodb MySql tables; rows of B have a foreign key towards A.
In the time span of 15-20 minutes, 2 different users created 3 A objects and some 10-20 B objects that weren't committed to MySql but were indexed by Plone; queries I executed with a MySql client from the linux shell weren't able to find those A rows (didn't look for B rows); however, queries executed through the web application (the aforementioned components stack) by those 2 users, and also by other users, occasionally were still finding and correctly visualizing some of those 3 A objects.
Only after I restarted the Zope instance, it was possible to resume normal activity from the Plone web interface; 3 A rows and many B rows were still missing from the MySql db, but the autoincrement counter showed the expected increment; I had to remove 3 invalid brains for A objects from the Plone index (didn't worry for B objects).
Any suggestion on possible causes and on how to investigate the problem?