Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

From: Markus Bertheau <twanger(at)bluetwanger(dot)de>
To: jamie <jamiemcc(at)blueyonder(dot)co(dot)uk>
Cc: Paolo Maggi <paolo(dot)maggi(at)polito(dot)it>, "Gustavo J(dot) A(dot) M(dot) Carneiro" <gjc(at)inescporto(dot)pt>, GNOME Desktop Hackers <desktop-devel-list(at)gnome(dot)org>, pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8
Date: 2004-04-05 17:59:27
Message-ID: 1081187966.2001.16.camel@yarrow.bertheau.de
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В Пнд, 05.04.2004, в 18:36, jamie пишет:
> Isn't it about time Gnome adopted and standardised on an RDBMS to help
> solve all these data storage problems?
>
> Whilst we are going to end up with an RDBMS anyhow cause Gnome Storage
> will use one, it makes sense to have one available for all desktop apps
> and services especially as it will save a hell of a lot of coding and
> wasted man hours in developing propriety storage dumps and associated
> IPC access mechanisms (I wonder how much development time could have
> been saved if Evolution Data Server used an RDBMS?).
>
> An RDBMS will provide us with security, concurrent access, transactions
> and highly efficient network transparency all for free. It also allows
> thin clients to be developed with the bulk of all business rules being
> implemented as stored procedures and triggers. Gnome-DB already provides
> us with a rich widget set for rapid development of such thin clients and
> thanks to the built in the network transparency, an admin user can
> remotely administer desktops using the same thin clients.
>
> My preferred RDBMS for the desktop is Firebird (formerly known as
> Interbase but released by Borland as open source under a mozilla style
> license - http://firebird.sourceforge.net). Whilst Gnome storage is
> currently being built around Postgres, Postgres is as far as I know an
> RDBMS designed as a server for high volume transactions and and high
> user counts and as such might be overkill (and heavy on resource usage
> too).

PostgreSQL is not resource hungry:

[bert(at)yarrow bert]$ ps aux | head -1; ps aux | grep ^post
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
postgres 1609 0.0 0.5 19112 2280 ? S 18:32 0:00 /usr/bin/postmaster -p 5432 -D /var/lib/pgsql/data
postgres 1613 0.0 0.5 9912 2068 ? S 18:32 0:00 postgres: stats buffer process
postgres 1614 0.0 0.5 9060 2100 ? S 18:32 0:00 postgres: stats collector process

> Firebird on the other hand was designed as an embeddable RDBMS to
> be used in systems where administration was not possible or desirable
> and where reliability, small memory footprint and high performance with
> tiny resource usage was required. Firebird, unlike other RDBMS, does not
> use any record locking (it has a multiple generation architecture
> instead)

PostgreSQL too.

> so that availability of data is always guaranteed (and
> blocks/record locks by concurrent users/threads is not an issue).
> Firebird can be easily embedded into Gnome cause it provides an API to
> generate events (callbacks) to respond to certain conditions

PostgreSQL too.

> and it also
> provides user definable functions that can be used in its SQL (these are
> basically functions written in an external shard lib).

PostgreSQL too. You can write stored procedures in whatever language
that produces callable-from-C shared objects, Java, PL/PgSQL, Ruby, Perl
and some more.

Plus PostgreSQL has been BSD pretty much from the beginning and hasn't
been abandoned by it's fathers :)

--
Markus Bertheau <twanger(at)bluetwanger(dot)de>

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