Re: [Chicken-users] A call to arms

[Peter Bex]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 03:38:37PM -0500, Andrew Gwozdziewycz wrote:
> Certainly true, but let me ask you this. If you were planning to use an ASCII
> file as a storage engine, what details would you include? Would you not
> include a way to join other ASCII files, or do some sort of search? Would
> you not build in 'grep' to do filters with regex?

Probably. But I'd probably also store data in a hierarchical fashion if
I were using S-expression data in files (ie, nested trees).  If I knew
I was using a RDBMS, I'd use a totally different data model, something
that maps well to relational queries.

> The benefit of abstraction here is that we don't care about where it's stored.
> If we care about performance, we're going to use the engine that best fits
> the features we need anyway. We're not going to use ASCII files if we set
> our data up in an entirely relational way,

This is my point; you just said yourself that you care (or are forced to
care) about how it's stored. You can't abstract away from that.  So
switching to a different storage backend won't do you much good; you've
already set things up in a non-relational way so the RDBMS won't be able
to handle it very well.

> but there's no reason to not simulate
> a feature that doesn't exist in an storage engine if it makes sense to use.

It makes sense up to a certain point. It might be worth an experiment
to see how far you can get with this. You might even succeed and have a
great and pluggable data storage backend. I'm certainly not going to
stop you.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
--
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