early warning - new rdbms

[Chaitanya Chalasani]

I would like to beta-test as well.

On Wednesday 25 January 2006 14:16, Ulf Wiger (AL/EAB) wrote:
> I thought I'd let the cat out of the bag a little...
>
> If anyone wants to beta-test or help out with some
> of the more advanced problems, let me know.
>
>
> I've come pretty far along with a new version of
> rdbms. It has several nice features, and I think
> it's about to make the transition from 'somewhat
> interesting' to 'actually useful':
>
> - JIT compilation of verification code. The overhead
>   for type and bounds checking is now only a few (~5)
>   microseconds per write operation.
> - The parameterized indexes that I hacked into mnesia
>   before are now part of rdbms. This include ordered
>   indexes and fragmented indexes (i.e. hashed on
>   index value - so they should scale well.)
> - Rdbms will handle fragmented tables transparently
>   (And actually handles plain tables with less overhead
>   than mnesia_frag does.) The overhead for using the
>   rdbms access module (compared to no access module)
>   on a plain transaction is in the order of 20
>   microseconds on my 1 GHz SunBLADE.
> - Rdbms hooks into the transaction handling in such a
>   way that it can automatically rebuild the verification
>   code as soon as a schema transaction commits.
> - A readable file format for schema definitions, trying
>   to establish a structured way to create large mnesia
>   databases. I've also added a 'group' concept to be
>   able to group tables into corresponding subsystems,
>   since I thought this might be helpful in large
>   systems.
>
>
> I'm planning to release rdbms with OTP R11, since it
> requires some changes to mnesia that (hopefully) will
> make it into R11. R11 is planned for May.
>
> Some of the (fairly minor) changes to mnesia so far:
>
> - The access module can hook into the transaction
>   flow by providing callbacks for begin_activity()
>   and end_activity(). Rdbms uses this for proper
>   handling of abort and commit triggers as well as
>   loop detection in referential integrity checks.
>   It also allows rdbms to detect schema changes.
> - An 'on-load' hook allows rdbms to build indexes
>   the first time a table is loaded.
> - A low-level access API for foreign tables. My
>   first foreign table attempt was a 'disk_log'.
>   It makes it possible to properly log events
>   inside a transaction context. You also get
>   replicated logs almost for free, as well as
>   (if you want to) fragmented logs. (:
>   My next attempt at a foreign table is a read-
>   only file system (doesn't have to be read-only,
>   but I thought I'd start with that.) Thus
>   the experiments with converting regexps to
>   the select pattern syntax.
>
> One interesting experiment might be to define
> an ISAM table type for really large ordered sets
> on disk. Combining it with rdbms, you can type-
> specify the data types and then convert to
> whatever format is expected by the ISAM files.
>
> Some questions to those who might be interested:
>
> - I'd like to break compatibility with the old
>   rdbms in some respects. Is this a problem for
>   anyone? (speak now or forever hold your peace)
> - Do you have any suggestions or feature requests?
> - Do you want to help out?
>
> Regards,
> Uffe

-- 
Chaitanya Chalasani