Hi!

(ccing Magma list)

"Bill Schwab" <BSchwab at anest.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Any success or horror stories with OmniBase and/or Magma?  Can you
> report that either worked well at or got into trouble beyond any
> particular size (either in object count or bytes of data)?  Other
> comments?
> 
> Bill

>From the Gjallar project we can report that Magma works really nice. We
have had perhaps 2-3 buglets and Chris fixed them all quickly and
promptly. IIRC they were related mainly to the query stuff which Chris
pushed out fast because of our popular demand - so he was definitely not
to blame. :)

Generally I would say that the only "issue" we had was slow(ish) read
performance. So if you write an "interactive" application with Magma you
need to take two things into account:

1. Since Magma is an ODB it builds a cache of objects into your session.
So when/if the session is cold you get punished with load times. But
when it is hot they are zero. Essentially what this means in Gjallar is
that when a user logs in things will take a bit of time the first time
she does something. But from then on things go much faster and since a
Gjallar user typically is logged in for a long time - typically all day
- it works fine.

2. Even with a warm session (with lots of cached objects) you can still
get punished with longish load times. This can be remedied a LOT with
setting up good read strategies.

IMHO I think Magma would SHINE if we somehow could boost the
serialization/deserialization mechanism in it. Because I suspect this is
where the bottleneck is regarding the above. An Exuperified Magma could
be the answer - or some other HARD approach - I dunno. Chris?

regards, Göran