dets improvements?

[Ulf Wiger]

Den 2006-06-11 16:39:55 skrev Yariv Sadan <yarivvv@REDACTED>:

> I think that with its new clustering features,
> MySQL has positioned itself as very serious
> competition for Mnesia even in Mnesia's home
> court: soft real time applications. Yes, with
> MySQL you still have the semantic gap, which
> is not as sexy as with a pure Erlang DB. However,
> MySQL cluster has similar performace to Mnesia AFAIK,

MySQL Cluster (a.k.a. NDB) actually outperforms Mnesia rather  
significantly on in-memory database clusters. It is one of the few  
comparable products that does. In terms of transactions/second, NDB should  
be at least 2-4x faster than mnesia.


> MySQL has a great track record with running high traffic
> websites, it undergoes rapid development, and, best of
> all, MySQL is open source.

Well, a dual license, actually. But for practical purposes, this often  
means GPL.


> I think that if Ericsson wants Mnesia to stay relevent,
> it should invest significant resources in its continuing
> improvement. The competition is heating up and Mnesia is
> losing ground fast.

I don't know about losing ground. Mnesia never did target large databases,  
or even really cluster databases (even though it's turned out to be  
surprisingly competitive as a cluster database.) The standard solution for  
people handling large databases from Erlang is to use MySQL, Sybase or  
Oracle. There are lots of applications where mnesia is the obvious choice,  
mainly due to the seamless integration, but also because it runs in the  
same memory space and can serve simple requests within tens of  
microseconds.

Also, the only ones who ever choose mnesia are Erlang programmers. The  
lack of an ODBC interface (to mnesia) pretty much makes it a non-starter  
for anyone not using Erlang.

Having said this, I would very much like to see mnesia expand its  
capabilities, relieving more Erlang programmers from the hassles of ODBC  
and third-party product integration. (:

BR,
Ulf W
-- 
Ulf Wiger