[elephant-devel] Is there any reason not to develop a Postgresqlb ack-end?

[Ben]

resending this as i forgot to change my email address.....

we (the elephant owners) have been silent for far too long, sorry.  to
make a long story short -- neither of us have time to own elephant
anymore.  we've been debating on the side about how to deal with the
lack of time, and have procrastinated more and more....

so we're looking for a new owner for elephant.  we'll be happy to
answer what questions we can, but i don't forsee having the time to
deal with this for at least a year (or whenever my dissertation is
done.)  i'm really sorry to leave you folks hanging.

the good news is i think it shouldn't be too hard to deal with the
code base, which as you can see is not too big.  the code is also
fairly modular: there's some CLOS magic to make persistent objects, a
lisp datatype to byte stream serializer, and then the berkeley db back
end.  plus a bit more here and there.

to answer the immediate question, i don't think there's any reason why
one couldn't write a postgresql back end, but it might require some
thinking about redesign.  elephant assumes that the underlying
database is byte-oriented.  i assume this is possible with postgresql
but it doesn't really make much sense to use an SQL database without
using the SQL types.  that's just my opinion though.  if one wanted to
use SQL data types then maybe one should try out CL-SQL or somesuch?
i dunno.  i think there are other possibilities for a back end.
someone on the list a while back was talking about writing a lisp back
end.  that would be interesting.  i think sqllite might also be a
possibility.

there's a few patches hanging around in my mail folders (probably on
the list archive) which should be applied.  the CVS elephant is close
to a release, it just needs some tagging and regression testing.

sorry i'm writing from korea and i'm rather jetlagged.  but i'll be
back in the states soon.

any takers?

Ben

On 9/14/05, Gábor Melis <mega at hotpop.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 September 2005 22:04, Robert L. Read wrote:
> > I am considering extending Elephant to allow the use of Postgresql as
> > well as Berkeley-db.
> > This would make the use of Elephant easier to use for those users who
> > are not developing an
> > open-source solution and do not wish to pay for an Berkeley-db
> > license.
> >
> > Can anyone think of a reason I shouldn't undertake this?  Is anybody
> > already working on it
> > (or on some other Relational back-end?)
> >
> > Perhaps I am naive, but I expect it to take about two weeks.
>
> Nobody that I know is working on it.
>
> There *may* be some difficulty due to transaction handling semantics
> (retries/aborts/nesting), but last I checked Postgresql had some pretty
> nifty versioning scheme that I cannot recall :-).
>
> I would very much welcome such an effort, though.
>
> Cheers,
> Gábor Melis
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