[erlang-questions] Knowledge base in Erlang

Sean Hinde sean.hinde@REDACTED
Sat Jan 6 18:14:20 CET 2007


On 6 Jan 2007, at 14:57, Joel Reymont wrote:

> Folks,
>
> I'm tasked with rewriting a project from Lisp to Erlang. The project
> has a frames system where "objects" are represented as collections of
> properties. The "schemas" are kept separate from the data and schemas
> can inherit from other schemas.
>
> The complication in my case is that updates are versioned. Each
> update is time-stamped and old data is pushed away. This makes it
> easy to see the state of the system at any given point in time.
>
> I'm thinking of using a table per object property and indexing it on
> {object id, timestamp}. I know that I can use ordered_set but I'm
> wondering about the order. Can I retrieve the data matching the
> highest index value which in my case would be the last value pushed?
> What about the lowest index value?

mnesia:dirty_first/last/1

>
> How many tables can you keep in Mnesia? Would it make more sense to
> have a table per property _and_ object instance, i.e. call the table
> property_object_id and keep the index just on timestamp? This would,
> of course, exponentially increase the number of tables in the system.

probably not a good idea (depending on the size of the system). You  
can have about as many tables as there are available ets tables in  
the system.

Sean






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