[elephant-devel] QDBM Support

[Rangarajan Krishnamoorthy]

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" <read at robertlread.net>
To: "Elephant bugs and development" <elephant-devel at 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.
>
>
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