mmport80
A Database-less App Framework?
I suspect many apps these days have enough memory available for many tasks.
The problem with applications is that they crash and lose memory, so you need some storage, but we have Mnesia etc.
After the recent talk about component and design etc. I started thinking about this.
Could you have a ‘Phoenix’ with an Elm / Redux like architecture and backup state every so often to disk (automagically).
Of course you could include DB reliant features, but by default state would be backed up in the background.
I suspect that would simplify things quite a bit (perhaps too much - but at least you could get up and running quickly).
Perhaps this already exist in other frameworks?
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hubertlepicki
Okay, well not always. Try implementing in-memory joins / mapreduce on your virtual actors to filter them out to some subset matching given criteria, and then compare the speed to your SQL query that’d do the same. Or implement a full text search and compare it with elasticsearch.
Generally SQL/database will likely to be quicker when you need to deal with querying large data sets, and in-memory solution will be quicker to access to individual ones.
cmkarlsson
We are talking about state here. In my opinion if you have business data that needs to be persisted you should be using a SQL database. I also think that you should design and manage this outside of an application context. I.e use SQL scripts for DDL and migrations.
The business data is likely to outlive your application by a big margin. Having this completely separate from the app will make it much easier to maintain in the long run. Perhaps after 5 years you want to use a completely different framework. Your business data though is still the same and by having it managed outside of the application makes this transition much easier. You can also add multiple different applications to your data without having the design choices of one framework affect any other.
On the other hand. If the data is only there to help run the application and not a thing in itself then the database-less approach is interesting. This auxiliary data can be stored in many different ways and can be quite tightly coupled with your application as it is more there to help the application than being data you care about in the long run.
A third type of data would be ephemeral data which can be recreated at any time. This is usually stored in memory can can be recreated when needed.
Likely your application will contain all three and there may some overlap between the three. What I think is important is that business data and the auxiliary data is loosely coupled. On is the core of your business and the other is just there to help.
AstonJ
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quatermain
Hi, I know it’s 3 years old topic but somehow I have similar issue. I need “in-house” small data storage which has to be distribute between multiple apps(2 kind of apps with multiple instances) to share state. I’m thing about mnesia and Cachex for example. I wonder how you ended up and what solutions are available in these days.
Main reson for me to find this kind of storage it’s because I have two apps:
- api app
- show app
You can create structure with api and when you create you can show it with shop app. We use postgresql right now to store these information. It works well, until postgresql server is not available and we have to prepare for bigger traffic. So for example when we lost connection with psql for 3 seconds we can lost about 300-500 api calls. Right now I see only one solution and that’s distributed in-house(in-beam) storage which will handle it and async storing in posgresql for other use. I’m not sure if I need persistent storage for that kind of in-house db. I see only one reason for it: when some entries are not saved into postgresql and some app crash. But distribution can help with it.
Cachex is nice cache solution. But I have feelings that using it for my use case is not right and can make me more other problems. This kind of cache is more cache for already stored data, not pre-save cache I think.
Mnesia is battle tested, but I need only key-value storage where I store some information. I take token from URL, decrypt ids, load data by that ids and use data to show call 3rd party APIs and show informations.
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