[AgileWiki] databases

[Bill la F. <bil...@su...>]

Niall,

Anything that stores data these days can be called a database. There are 
two reasons why they are slow:

1. Since they are hard to write and general purpose, they are run as a 
separate process. This way you can have multiple applications sharing 
the same data. But running as a separate process, they are slower than 
if they were integrated into the application.

2. The best technology to date has been RDBMS and OODBMS. But they are 
not even a reasonable fit for most applications. So a lot of effort goes 
into trying to make databases faster, including amazing efforts by 
administrators to tune each database installation. But not being a good 
fit to start with, they remain hard to use and result in slow 
applications. This is a failure of theory.

Now with rolonics, we have a good theory of applications. And we can put 
the application server in the same process with the rolonic database. 
That makes it faster. But a rolonic database is also a very very good 
fit for applications. So, even while the database may be only so fast, 
the applications themselves are blazing fast--a rolonic database is 
always exactly what is needed for an application.

OK, not all of this is proven in practice yet. We'll get there. Also, 
rolonic applications are a bit different from regular applications--they 
are more focused on classifiers and journals and less ledger centric. 
And that makes them faster--they are programmed more correctly--as well 
as more natural for users.

Hmm. Some of this actually has been proven in practice, though not by 
me. Norm has been working on smaller applications of Rolonics and has 
had some very interesting successes, though the work has been 
propriatary. You were wondering perhaps, what kept Norm so busy? :-)

Bill

Niall Loughnane wrote:

> Hi Bill,
>  
> Apologies,
>  
> Although the link did not link to the open issues i did not see how 
> the enhancments could be made to AgileWiki, this was the first the 
> first time that i saw the link to AgileWike,
>  
> you are correct that this is all alternatives to ejb, ejb is after all 
> a package that would connect an external jar to ejb just to connect to 
> database connections etc? what a pain databases are? couldnt there be 
> something better than databases ie they are slow they are there just 
> too store data, cant be there something that has never been developed 
> yet, something that will make things better, databases are after all a 
> after all a run down thing, they come come corrupt? why? there is 
> oracle and sql server they come corrupt? all they do is store data and 
> is there only job, besides security etc? there should be something 
> different that agilewiki should be based on that the normal database 
> that agilewiki is based on? our ancestors didnt, ie Sir Bill Gate or 
> Sir Allen?
>