Re: sqlite3

[Sergey Organov]

Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu> writes:

>>> I've brought this up before, but I didn't really have a solution then,
>>> but I think I do now: sqlite3.
>> 
>> Personally, I'd prefer to keep my configuration/state files in plain
>> text, editable by Emacs.
>> 
>> Would it be feasible to have common state save/restore interface for
>> Emacs progrms/packages to use, and then configurable back-end to handle
>> actual persistence, being sqlite3, dbm, plain (elisp) text, and what
>> not?
> I’ve attached a plain Elisp incremental implementation in
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-12/msg00646.html
> Interface is simply
> make-kv-store (path)
> compact-kv-store (kv-store)
> kv-put (key value kv-store)
> kv-get (key kv-store)

Nice!

>
> But honestly, I suspect using any db as backend for a persistent lisp
> store will have virtually no advantage over plain text.
> Then why even introduce them at the first place.

That was my secret hope as well, because the obvious need for convenient
universal support for persistent storage has been somehow tightly mixed
with a need for some external DB, the latter being at least non-obvious.

>
> The more exciting thing will be to have a general object store
> rather than kv-store (aka, incremental for arbitrary mutation
> and preserve sharing). Any relational db will not help that either,
> and it is better to be done in pure Lisp.

I believe that depending on (any) DB is not the right way to go for
persistent storage. It rather should be abstracted-out and then DB will
likely won't be used as suitable backend anyway.

Thanks,
-- Sergey Organov