Asp Forum - [ANN] Mongoose 0.1.0

Jamey Cribbs

7/19/2006 3:41:00 PM

Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has an
ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing, and
Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose, because, like
Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it to be small, quick,
and friendly.

You can download it from: http://rubyforge.org/projects...

*Credits*
-------------
Thanks to Logan Capaldo for letting me steal a lot of the code from
KirbyRecord.

Thanks to Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Fabien Franzen, whose ez_where Rails
plugin, provided much of the
inspiration for the query language.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on KirbyBase. I have tried to
put all the lessons learned from developing that library to good use here.

*Features*
---------------
* Pure Ruby, with no external dependencies.

* ActiveRecord-like interface.

* Fast queries on indexed fields (Up to 10x faster than KirbyBase).
Indexes are Skiplists, which are just plain fun to play around with.

* Not an in-memory database. Data is only read in from disk when needed
and changes are immediately written out to disk.

* In-memory indexes are initialized from dedicated index files, rather
than rebuilt from scratch upon database initialization (like KirbyBase
does). This can greatly reduce startup times.

* Supports any data type that Marshal supports.

* Table relations supported via has_one, has_many.

*Why?*
-----------
Well, I started to look into performance improvements for KirbyBase.
One thing I noticed was that Ruby takes a comparatively long time
converting strings to native data types like Integer, Time, etc. Since
KirbyBase stores its records as strings, returning a large result set
could take a long time. I found that if I Marshaled records before I
wrote them to disk, a subsequent read of those records was significantly
faster.

About the same time, I read a paper about skiplists. A skiplist is a
data structure that is relatively simple (compared to say a b-tree) to
understand and implement in code. I was able to take the pseudo-code in
the paper and implement a Ruby version in a couple of hours. Skiplists
are pretty fast and since they are pretty easy to understand, I think
there is good potential to tweak them. So, I wanted to try using
skiplists for indexing rather than KirbyBase's array-based indexes.

I started to retrofit both the Marshal serialization and Skiplists in
KirbyBase, but quickly found that it was going to be more work than just
starting over from scratch with a new design. Besides, I didn't want to
radically change KirbyBase and piss off the current user base (both of
you know who you are).

So, I started from scratch. This also gave me the opportunity to make
two other major changes. First of all, I wanted to keep the query
language as close to KirbyBase's as possible (i.e. Ruby blocks), but I
wanted more control over the query expression. I took the opportunity
to borrow a lot of idea's from Ezra's ez_where plugin. I think this
will give me the capability down the road to tweak the query engine,
based on the query itself.

The second thing I changed was that I have finally seen the light about
ActiveRecord, so I stole pretty much all of Logan's KirbyRecord code to
give Mongoose an ActiveRecord-like api.

The end result of all of this (I hope) is a database management system
that is small, easy to use, and fast.

*What about KirbyBase?*
------------------------------------
KirbyBase is not going anywhere. I still plan on supporting it into the
foreseeable future. However, I imagine that most new development will
be directed at Mongoose.

4 Answers

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

7/19/2006 4:06:00 PM

On Jul 19, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Jamey Cribbs wrote:

> Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has
> an ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing,
> and Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose,
> because, like Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it
> to be small, quick, and friendly.
>
> You can download it from: http://rubyforge.org/projects...
>
> *Credits*
> -------------
> Thanks to Logan Capaldo for letting me steal a lot of the code from
> KirbyRecord.
>
> Thanks to Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Fabien Franzen, whose ez_where
> Rails plugin, provided much of the
> inspiration for the query language.
>
> Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on KirbyBase. I have tried
> to put all the lessons learned from developing that library to good
> use here.
>
>

Jamey-

This looks awesome! I totally have a few good uses for this. I will
be playing with this and giving you feedback and maybe a few patches
as i get familiar with it.

Thanks Jamey!

-Ezra

James Gray

7/19/2006 4:48:00 PM

On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:41 AM, Jamey Cribbs wrote:

> Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has
> an ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing,
> and Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose,
> because, like Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it
> to be small, quick, and friendly.

This really interesting stuff Jamey. Thanks for sharing!

James Edward Gray II

Michel Martens

7/19/2006 6:00:00 PM

On 7/19/06, Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs@netpromi.com> wrote:
> Mongoose is a database management system written in Ruby. It has an
> ActiveRecord-like interface, uses Skiplists for its indexing, and
> Marshal for its data serialization. I named it Mongoose, because, like
> Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, my aim is for it to be small, quick,
> and friendly.
>

Great job!
--
Michel

Jamey Cribbs

7/20/2006 1:14:00 AM

Ezra Zygmuntowicz wrote:
> Jamey-
>
> This looks awesome! I totally have a few good uses for this. I
> will be playing with this and giving you feedback and maybe a few
> patches as i get familiar with it.

Thank *you* for ez_where! I have to admit that, even though I looked at
your code, I still couldn't totally wrap my head around how you had made
some of the ez_where magic happen. So, if you do get a chance to look
at my query code and give me any pointers on what I could do better,
that would be great.

Jamey

comp.lang.ruby

[ANN] Mongoose 0.1.0

Jamey Cribbs

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

James Gray

Michel Martens

Jamey Cribbs

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