Robert,
I am the one who started this thread, so let me clarify.
The background: I am starting to work on a .NET-based application (for
Windows platforms) that might benefit by Lisp integration. I purchased
Lispworks Enterprise in this context. When I searched for a lisp persistence
library, I was told to consider Elephant. I tried it and it seems to work
fine for me. Elephant documentation advises that BDB is the best performing
backend among the backends it supports. But it appears that I cannot just
"buy" BDB by opting for a one-time initial payment. I have to pay runtime
royalties. This is different from other libraries that I have used so far.
Although there may be legitimate reasons why Oracle does it this way, I am
more comfortable with one-time payment. So the problem I am facing is that I
would love to use Elephant in my work, but BDB's licensing is the concern. I
found out that QDBM is another popular DB implementation which does not have
this licensing issue, so posted the question to this list. It is not just
that QDBM outperforms BDB (I don't know this). Please note that I am not
against paying for the library that I use, but just that I am not in favor
of royalties.
Coming to your suggestion that it would be wise to build a very simple,
native lisp backend without the "frills", I am for it!
Regards,
Rangarajan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert L. Read" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Elephant bugs and development" <elephant-devel@common-lisp.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: [elephant-devel] QDBM Support
On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 10:41 -0500, Ian Eslick wrote:
The answer to all of this, I think, is having a native lisp version
that has BDB's performance and no licensing restrictions. Then
supporting the other two becomes: Postmodern for a higher degree of
reliability as well as for distributed systems and BDB for legacy
reasons.
I have a pretty good idea in my head of what an all-lisp backend
requires and having one would lay to rest all of these discussions
of
bringing up "yet another backend". Edi Weitz and I discussed
collaborating on this, but unfortunately he had some other projects
that took priority.
Is there a small critical mass of people out there that care enough
about this that they'd be willing to contribute to such a project?
I
don't have the time to do it on my own, but if we broke it up into
small projects over the next handful of months, I don't think it's a
ton of work. I can put in a solid chunk of integration work in mid
to
late April.
I completely agree with Ian about the value of a LISP-native backend.
However, I can not personally offer to help with this. I have in fact
abandoned my business plans for the time being and taken a normal job.
Moreover, since I did the "schema evolution" system that we used in the
Java application for Hire.com a while back, I feel more comfortable
working on that than on the LISP native backend, although I think both
are wonderful and challenging problems.
The excellent set of automated tests produced by the original authors of
Elephant (Andrew Blumberg and Ben Lee) and strengthened by Ian and
myself and others since then remain the greatest asset in undertaking
the LISP-Native backend.
I know that many of you understand most of the technical challenges in
bringing up a Native LISP backend better than I do. However, let me ask
the question that my acquaintance Kent Beck always asks:
What is the simplest thing that could possible work?
By which I mean, is there any value in making a very simple LISP native
backend? Forget locking, transactions, efficiency, and all that other
ocean-boiling stuff that we all know will be needed for an enterprise
application. Can anybody build a Native-Lisp backend in a weekend?
If so, we would have an excellent "spike" solution that would inform
further efforts, and furthermore we would have an out-of-the-box
solution for demoing Elephant that would require ZERO additional
software installations. This would be very useful, even if there are
performance and reliability limits to that backend.
_______________________________________________
elephant-devel site list
elephant-devel@common-lisp.net
http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
_______________________________________________
elephant-devel site list
elephant-devel@common-lisp.net
http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
