implementing a notification list

[Martin DeMello]

I'm new to Erlang, and having a bit of trouble coming up with the
right way to do this:

I have a set of mnesia triggers that watch for various db events. I
now want to have a persistent notification list that supports the
following two operations efficiently:

1. insert a new event, with timestamp
2. retrieve all events between two given timestamps

and possibly less efficiently

3. compact the table (combine several updates to a single object into
a single row)

This post http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-programming/browse_thread/thread/522f4dfce53ca4e7
seems to imply that simply storing the notifications as an mnesia
table is a bad idea.

martin