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3.7 CL-SQL

Although originally designed as an interface to the BerkeleyDB system, the original Elephant system has been extended to support the use of relational database management systems as the implementation of the persistent store. This relies on Kevin Rosenberg's CL-SQL interface, which provides access to a large number of relational systems.

A major motivation of this extension is that one one might prefer the licensing of a different system. For example, at the time of this writing, it is our interpretation that one cannot use the BerkeleyDB system behind a public website http://www.sleepycat.com/download/licensinginfo.shtml#redistribute unless one releases the entire web application as open source.

Neither the PostGres DBMS nor SQLite 3, nor Elephant itself, imposes any such restriction.

Other reasons to use a relational database system might include: familiarity with those systems, the fact that some part of your application needs to use the truly relational aspects of those systems, preference for the tools associated with those systems, etc.

Elephant provides functions for migrating data seamlessly between data stores. One can quite easily move data from a BerkeleyDB repository to a PostGres repository, and vice versa. This offers at least the possibility than one can develop using one data store, for example BerkeleyDB, and then later move to Postgres. One could even operate simultaneously out of multiple repositories, if there were a good reason to do so.

The SQL implementation shares the serializer with the BDB data store, but base64 encodes the resulting binary stream. This data is placed into a single table in the SQL data store.

All functionality except for nested transaction support and cursor-puts supported by the BerkeleyDB data store is supported by the CL-SQL data store. CL-SQL transaction integrity under concurrent operation has not been extensively stress tested.

Additionally, it is NOT the case that the Elephant system currently provides transaction support across multiple repositories; it provides transaction support on a per-repository basis.

The PostGres backend is currently about 5 times slower than the BerkeleyDB backend. As of the time of this writing, only PostGres and SqlLite 3 have been tested as CL-SQL backends.