Thread: Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

From
Markus Bertheau
Date:
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@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@bluetwanger.de>


Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

From
Alan Cox
Date:
On Llu, 2004-04-05 at 18:59, Markus Bertheau wrote
> PostgreSQL is not resource hungry:

Its not exactly "lightweight" either.

You are having the wrong argument. If the gconf internals are rich
enough in 2.8 then you can sqlite, ldap, webdav, whatever to carry your
data around with you.

There isn't a 'wrong' storage answer once you have the abstractions.


Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

From
jamie
Date:
> 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.
>
More dependencies yes but it is a nice feature. I prefer a functional
language to a procedural one for stored procedures cause its a lot
easier and quicker to get what you want that way.


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

I dont think thats relevant. Borland took interbase back to closed
source and is still available commercially so its not abandoned.

Whilst I prefer Firebird I don't mind using Postgres instead just as
long as the best and most appropriate RDBMS is chosen for GNOME and that
might well be Firebird or Postgres. It just so happens that
Interbase/Firebird has more advantages that might be important:

1) Smaller footprint
2) Easy setup - no tweaking required like Postgres and it works
optimally out of the box.
3) Minimal administration (apart from user and persmission setup no
further tweaking is required)
4) Better performance (Postgres needs more tweaking just to get close)


IMO, for a novice user wanting a no nonsense RDBMS with minimal
maintenance Firebird easily beats Postgres. Feel free to prove otherwise
- a proper and fair evaluation of installing postgres/firebird and the
issues surrounding them should reveal which is most appropriate.


jamie.





Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

From
Enrico Weigelt
Date:
* jamie <jamiemcc@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

<snip>
> 1) Smaller footprint
Okay, pgsql is (IMHO) not suited for running on PDA ;-)
btw: whats with SQLite / txtsql for this case ?

> 2) Easy setup - no tweaking required like Postgres and it works
> optimally out of the box.
> 3) Minimal administration (apart from user and persmission setup no
> further tweaking is required)
Where's pgsql hard to setup ?

> 4) Better performance (Postgres needs more tweaking just to get close)
eh ?
probably there're some things to tune dependent on memory size.
but I'd consider it as a feature :)
it shouldn't be a hard task to write a script for it.

With some little work (some shellscripts should be enought), it's also
suited for doing pure-userland installations quite easy.
Probably I'll build a package for that in several weeks.

But, okay, the memory footprint is a point for you. pgsql is not build
for that.

<snip>
> IMO, for a novice user wanting a no nonsense RDBMS with minimal
> maintenance Firebird easily beats Postgres. Feel free to prove otherwise
> - a proper and fair evaluation of installing postgres/firebird and the
> issues surrounding them should reveal which is most appropriate.
hmm, some time ago (quite long) there was msql (mini-sql) around.
did anyone hear again from it ?


Well, let us setup a comparison of several RDBMS for such use-cases.

cu
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