[Seaside] Re: GOODS

[C. David Shaffer]

Tomáš Svárovský wrote:
> Hi Sebastian, thanks for an answer
>
> Using goods was definitely my choice as I am just playing with seaside
> and not using it for anything meaningful right now. As I have said I
> am quite new so I welcomed the fact that there was something like a
> step by step tutorial for setting up a database (I ve already tried
> magma but didnt manage to get it up and running. I will probably have
> to try it again).
>
> Can you be more specific about why not using GOODS? For my purposes I
> dont care if I use object oriented or relational DB. I just would like
> to learn at least one reliable way to store my data in seaside app
> (and store it right inside an image in an OrderedCollection or
> something like that just doesnt seem right, but correct me if I am
> wrong), so if you could propose a solution that seems to be stable and
> reliable and potentially usable in production, that would be very
> helpful as well.
>   
Tomas,

I don't want to interrupt Sebastian as I'm sure he has some very good 
reasons for not liking GOODS. But I do want to add that there are 
several of us using it in production and it is a great persistence 
solution in Squeak. The only problem I really have with it (which is not 
a GOODS problem but a Squeak problem) is that commits can be very slow 
if you have loaded a lot of objects in a transaction. That is, when you 
commit the Squeak client needs to check all of the objects loaded in 
your transaction from the database to see if any of them are "dirty" 
(have been changed since they were loaded). This process involves a 
linear search which can be very slow when you have a lot of objects 
loaded. I added the method #cacheSize to KKDatabase in order for me to 
be able to monitor this. This problem might be solved by WriteBarrier 
but I've never been able to get that to work efficiently. In the mean 
time I have several Squeak/Seaside production applications using GOODS 
and, with some small tuning here and there, they all chug along nicely.

David