[elephant-devel] Understanding real-world use of Elephant

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Hi all,

I'm still on my quest to learn to effectively use Elephant. Although documentation is not so abundant, I've gotten a pretty good start with the available documentation.

However, I don't have such a strong background on using ODBs and mainly come from the SQL world. So, just for curiousity's sake, I read the tutorial for AllegroCache which tries to show the "proper" way to use AllegroCache in real-world systems (http://www.franz.com/products/allegrocache/docs/acachetutorial.pdf).

Well, conceptwise, I followed everything in that tutorial and could pretty much relate everything to Elephant. However, the truth is that I thought there was a tremendous "overhead" in using AllegroCache when dealing with multiple threads. The reality is that the applications we are thinking on using Elephant for are web-based applications served by multiple web servers, so the practicality of the tutorial was more inline to our objective use of Elephant.

So, I figured that both systems (Elephant and AllegroCache) have more or less the same usage for practical purposes. But, none of the Elephant documentation I've read on Elephant has even referred to the things mentioned in the tutorial when dealing with multiple threads. I have read on the list that Elephant is thread safe, but am wondering if anyone could help me understand how Elephant would be different from AllegroCache.

For example, do I still need to handle connection pools and thread locks and all of that in order to do simple multi-threaded requests? Not that I'm looking for an easy way out, but coming from the world of simply "using" a SQL-database and being presented with the needs of having to incorporate a lot of "logic" that the database server would've handled for you into your application seems a bit overwhelming at first.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the way AllegroCache is architected (e.g. things like isolation between connections, etc) or other factors I'm not aware of. Again, I only read the tutorial in trying to learn more how to "apply the concepts" of ODB so I could understand them better.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Daniel