[Seaside] object databases and other questions of architecture

James Foster Smalltalk at JGFoster.net
Thu Mar 27 16:12:24 UTC 2008


> Hi Sean,
>
> As an employee of GemStone Systems I'm certainly biased, but I'd  
> suggest you investigate GLASS (http://seaside.gemstone.com). While  
> object databases are used in fewer applications than relational  
> ones, when OODBs are used, they are used heavily and found to be  
> quite stable. Following are a couple quotes from http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.594244.20 
> :
>
> "I work for a major shipping company. We have a massive OODB and  
> Smalltalk Application (500 gig range) with 3 million lines of code.  
> We have 2000 plus daily users. We can do 700 transactions a second  
> before slowing down. We also have a Java + SQL +EMS system. On a  
> good day they can do 70 transactions a second, with three times the  
> hardware."   --Timo (Saturday, February 16, 2008)
>
> "Along side with the major shipping company, we are a major  
> commodities exchange using GS and ST and while our operational DB is  
> small (about 5 GB at the start of the trading day to less than 75 GB  
> and the end) we are probably one of the fastest.  We easily handle  
> transaction rates approaching 6000/sec with about 8000+ daily  
> users.  Our average data center round trip times are in the 2-3 ms  
> range [from when an external request is received till a response is  
> sent to the client]." --GemStone Weenie (Monday, February 18, 2008)
>
> You specified 12 million objects. At 100 bytes per object, this  
> comes to 1.2 GB in space. GemStone/S will handle this fine on a  
> variety of Linux distributions.
>
> James Foster
>
> On Mar 27, 2008, at 6:16 AM, Sean Allen wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am looking for a new and better set of tools to use to build the  
>> next version of the software we use to run our e-commerce site
>> both front and back ends. There is a lot about Seaside that gets my  
>> imagination running with how easy it would make certain
>> things we have thought about doing that are just plain hard to do  
>> with most tools. Our urrent system is mysql 5, nginx, memcached
>> and mod-perl based web-applications and a variety of scripts that  
>> get run via cron for day to day housekeeping.
>>
>> I'm sick of fighting with ORMs and ending up stuck in a land that  
>> is neither OO nor Relational so a key point of this is
>> to ditch the mysql and find a nice stable object database. From  
>> what I've seen when looking at the options available for
>> use with Seaside there is magma, goods and webstone/s. Am I missing  
>> anything in that list? Can anyone give me
>> feedback on any of those from the standpoint of... our relational  
>> database would immediately map into something in
>> the area of at least 12 million object and depending on design  
>> upwards of 20 million with at least 250,000 being added
>> monthly. As object databases get much less use than relational  
>> ones, I'm quite a bit more nervous about this part of
>> the process than I would be if it was something like: mysql or  
>> postgres.
>>
>> Currently we run everything off of debian boxes. Are there issues  
>> with the type of memory use etc that we would looking
>> at with running on debian ( or any other linux ) in terms of  
>> stability etc? I seem to remember seeing something about
>> squeak having issues with larger image sizes. Would a different VM  
>> be better suited for the task I have at hand?
>>
>> I really like Seaside and think we could do great things with it  
>> but I have quite step learning curve pretty much across
>> the board here so any help with narrowing down architecture  
>> questions some is greatly appreciated.
>>
>> -Sean-
>>
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>



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