Phillipp
Hey,
I wonder what would be some valuable options for process state backups if one does not want to add a database like Postgres to the setup.
In my particular case, I got a bunch of “tracking” processes that should survive an application restart (e.g. from deployment). Hot code reloading is not an option in our Kubernetes setup.
The state I need to backup does not contain Elixir specific data structures (e.g. atoms) so it can easily be encoded to JSON and back into lists and maps.
What I have thought of so far:
- Writing JSON files (e.g.
{identifier}.json) to disk and load them on startup - Writing state to Mnesia (maybe useful if we add clustering later)
Are there any other options I am not aware of? What would you guys do in my case?
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tty
I would favor
mnesiaand not bother with JSON since you can stuff the entire map/struct intomnesiawithout worrying about marshalling.LostKobrakai
If you can store stuff on the filesystem I’d rather user
:erlang.term_to_binarythan json.Phillipp
That is also what I thought. Never worked with Mnesia. I hope I can specify a custom filesystem location for the Mnesia data so I can simply mount it to the container.
Phillipp
Good point. I always forget about that.
Phillipp
I think I go for
:erlang.term_to_binaryin my case.Good read:
dimitarvp
If you don’t need dynamic querying and joins, both mnesia and plain files are fine.
engineeringdept
Redis can be good for storing binary blobs for retrieval later, depending on the size.
tty
You can but it is a global value i.e. every mnesia table for that node would be stored there. You can specify it in the sys.config or on the command line
-mnesia dir Directory.tty
If you are using
mnesiaoretsordetsthere is no need forterm_to_binary.al2o3cr
If you’re using it as a straightforward “tracker ID → stored state” persistent mapping, maybe DETS would be sufficient? It lacks the general transactional behaviors of Mnesia, but reads of a single key are guaranteed to not see partially-written data.