TinyDB Julia
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TinyDB Julia
An extremely simple database written in the Julia Programming Language. This is a very rudimentary database and lacks many features you would expect in a production-ready system, such as indexing for fast lookups, transactions, concurrency control, error handling, data integrity checks, and more. It is intended to be used for small projects where you need a database but don't want to deal with the overhead of setting up a full-fledged database.
Why?
I've been learning Julia and this seemed like a fun project to create.
Julia Highlights
Fast
Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM.
Dynamic
Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use.
Reproducible
Reproducible environments make it possible to recreate the same Julia environment every time, across platforms, with pre-built binaries.
Composable
Julia uses multiple dispatch as a paradigm, making it easy to express many object-oriented and functional programming patterns. The talk on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch explains why it works so well.
General
Julia provides asynchronous I/O, metaprogramming, debugging, logging, profiling, a package manager, and more. One can build entire Applications and Microservices in Julia.
Open source
Julia is an open source project with over 1,000 contributors. It is made available under the MIT license. The source code is available on GitHub.
Requirements
- Julia v1.9.2 - (July 5, 2023)
Instal Julia
brew install --cask julia
or
Download and install from julialang.org
TinyDB Julia - Installation
Since this is a simple project, there is no installation process per se. You just need to clone the repository and ensure you have Julia installed on your system.
git clone https://github.com/erictherobot/tinydb-julia.git
Usage
This project provides a TinyDB struct that represents the database and store and retrieve functions to interact with the database.
Here is a basic example:
include("src/TinyDB.jl")
# create a new database
db = TinyDB("mydb.txt")
# store a key-value pair in the database
store(db, "Hello", "World")
# retrieve the value for a given key
println(retrieve(db, "Hello")) # prints "World"
The database is stored in a text file. The file format is very simple: each line contains a key-value pair separated by a colon. For example, the following file contains two key-value pairs:
Running the Example
To run the example, use the following command:
julia example.jl
This will create a database file called mydb.txt and store the key-value pair "Hello": "World" in the database. It will then retrieve the value for the key "Hello" and print it to the console.
Tests
This project includes a small set of tests. You can run the tests with the following command:
julia test/runtests.jl
which should produce the following output:
Test Summary: | Pass Total Time
TinyDB Tests | 3 3 0.1s
These tests verify basic functionality such as storing and retrieving key-value pairs, and overwriting existing keys with new values. They also test that the database file is created if it does not already exist.
Future Work
While this project is intentionally simple, there are many ways it will be extended:
- Add error handling: Currently, if an error occurs during a file operation, the program will crash. It would be better to catch these errors and handle them gracefully.
- Support more data types: Right now, this database can only store strings. It would be useful to support other data types, such as integers, floats, and booleans.
- Indexing: To improve lookup speed, an index could be added. This would be especially beneficial for large databases.
- Transactions: Adding support for transactions would make the database more robust and allow for complex operations that involve multiple reads and writes.
- Concurrency control: If multiple processes are accessing the database at the same time, there is a risk of data corruption. Adding concurrency control would prevent this.
- Data integrity checks: It would be useful to add some sort of checksum to the database file to ensure that it has not been corrupted.
- More tests: The test suite could be expanded to cover more functionality and edge cases.
- Benchmarks: It would be interesting to compare the performance of this database to other databases.
- Documentation: This project could benefit from more documentation, including a description of the database format and how to use the database.
License
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
Contributing
If you find this useful as is please let me know. If you find any bugs, please feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue. If you have any questions, you can contact me.
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