On 9/5/2013 4:28 AM, Alex Peshkoff wrote: > On 09/04/13 18:11, Jim Starkey wrote: > >> So here's another seriously heretical thought. If you're planning for >> Firebird to hang around another 27 years, it's time to define a modern >> OO API that is easy to use from modern languages, is flexible and >> extensible, supports an efficient remote protocol, and can fully support >> the legacy SQL APIs as a proper client layer and maybe even BLR, if >> that's still important. > That's what was done in FB3, except probably one point - what do you > mean under 'supports an efficient remote protocol'? API is not > _directly_ releated with remote protocol. In FB3 we kept remote protocol > more or less (sooner more) as it was before. But new OO API, working > with that protocol, was defined. SQLDA API is implemented as a layer > over it (in FB3 - directly in yvalve, i.e. yvalve currently supports > both APIs).
OK, I haven't looked at the protocol for about a million years, so consider this a critique of my earlier work, not necessarily the current state of affairs. Network efficiency has a number of elements. The most important is reducing the number of round trips to a bare minimum. Following that (distantly) is minimizing the number of bytes sent. Last is minimizing the CPU load to encode/decode communication packets. The keys to reducing round trips are to bundle metadata with data to eliminate the need for "info" trips and, most importantly, to batch record retrievals and batch inserts into single large packets. Sending a MB worth of records is obviously a great win. So is implementing the equivalent of the JDBC batch update semantics. The encoding we've been talking about for record encoding is also an excellent encoding for communication, being both dense and platform independent, eliminating the need for separate homogenous / heterogeneous modes of the original Interbase protocol. And, since all numbers and strings can be arbitrarily large without wasting bytes, there are no tradeoffs necessary on field size (as Ann loves to point out, I'm a victim of the bit depression and tend to makes things a little smaller than I should to save space). For both Netfrastructure and NuoDB I've used JDBC as the client API, though the protocols were quite different. One of the advantages of starting over from time to time is that you get/have to re-evaluate everything thing you've done in past, partly for efficiency and partly to avoid accusation of piracy. It's a good habit to get into, however. When you find a better way to something, go for it. A good example of this came up in a "master class" class I was teaching before I left NuoDB. Somehow we stumbled onto the topic of string to date conversions. While I was pointing out that the worst part of starting a new software company was rewriting "stringToDate", a completely new, incredibly efficient, open ended algorithm for that class of conversions occurred to me. It's really cute, and if anyone is interested, I'll describe it. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, more! > Discover the easy way to master current and previous Microsoft technologies > and advance your career. Get an incredible 1,500+ hours of step-by-step > tutorial videos with LearnDevNow. Subscribe today and save! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58041391&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, more! Discover the easy way to master current and previous Microsoft technologies and advance your career. Get an incredible 1,500+ hours of step-by-step tutorial videos with LearnDevNow. Subscribe today and save! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58041391&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
