[erlang-questions] Mnesia sorting/limiting

[Ulf Wiger]

Barry Mitchelson wrote:
> 
> ...aside from this specific problem,
> the more general question I'm trying to find an answer is how to
> select data from an mnesia table ordered by a certain element and
> limited without having to go through the entire table when I perform
> the sort. I'm not sure if I'm trying to shoehorn my SQL thinking into
> this, or if I'm not aware of the solution.

The easiest way to do this would be to use an ordered set,
using an entry like {{Priority, Timestamp}, Reference},
where Reference is some reference to whatever it is that
you have queued.

If you want to have ascending order on priority and LIFO
on time, you can use the following trick:

timestamp() ->
    {A,B,C} = erlang:now(),
    {-A,-B,-C}.

(FIFO is more common, of course, but sometimes LIFO makes more
sense in practice, along the lines of "serve the ones most
likely to succeed".)

Then you can use mnesia:dirty_first(Tab) to pick the first item
from the queue.

If you want to limit the number of entries, mnesia:table_info(Tab,size)
will give you the number of objects, and you can delete the last item
when you push a new one, once you've hit the limit.

BR,
Ulf W


-- 
Ulf Wiger
CTO, Erlang Training & Consulting Ltd
http://www.erlang-consulting.com