michalmuskala

michalmuskala

Another small library today.

PersistentEts

Hex: persistent_ets | Hex
GitHub: GitHub - michalmuskala/persistent_ets · GitHub

Ets table backed by a persistence file.

The table is persisted using the :ets.file2tab/2 and :ets.tab2file/3 functions.

Table is to be created with PersistentEts.new/3 in place of :ets.new/2. After that all functions from :ets can be used like with any other table, except :ets.give_away/3 and :ets.delete/1 - replacement functions are provided in this module. The :ets.setopts/2 function to change the heir is not supported - the heir setting is leveraged by the persistence mechanism.

Like with regular ets table, the table is destroyed once the owning process (the one that called PersistentEts.new/3) dies, but the table data is persisted so it will be re-read when table is opened again.

Example

pid = spawn(fn -> 
  :foo = PersistentEts.new(:foo, "table.tab", [:named_table])
  :ets.insert(:foo, [a: 1])
end)
Process.exit(pid, :diediedie)
PersistentEts.new(:foo, "table.tab", [:named_table])
[a: 1] = :ets.tab2list(:foo)

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michalmuskala

michalmuskala OP

With Dets every operation (read or write) hits the disk. For many application such a performance penalty (compared to ets) is not acceptable. Furthermore Dets tables are limited to 2GB. Dets doesn’t support the ordered_set table type either.

With PersistentEts, the table remains in memory, so all read and write operations have the same performance they would have with pure ets. Only periodically the table state is saved to a file. There’s also no file limit, besides the memory and disk limitations. Since it’s a regular Ets table, all types are fully supported.

hubertlepicki

hubertlepicki

Could you highlight for us how it differs from DETS and why would someone choose one against another?

hubertlepicki

hubertlepicki

Copy paste that to readme now.

Last Post!

lessless

lessless

Thank you for insights!

I tried to look into the sources of tab2file but didn’t have enough patience to dig deep down into what they’re using there for file manipulation :smile:
I just saw that they’re using message passing and that was enough for me to understand that there will definitely be overhead.

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