GemStone-Linux-Apache-Seaside-Smalltalk.. how practical is 4GB?

Question

I am really interested in GLASS. The 4GB limit for the free version has me concerned. Especially when I consider the price for the next level ($7000 year).

1. I know this can be subjective and variable, but can someone describe for me in everyday terms what 4 GB of GLASS will get you? Maybe a business example. 4 GB may get me more storage than I realize.. and I don't have to worry about it.

2. In my app, some messages have file attachments up to 5 MB in size. Can I conserve the 4 GB of Gemstone space by saving these attachments directly to files on the operating system, instead of inside Gemstone? I'm thinking yes.

Answer 1

4GB is quite a decent size database. Not having used gemstone before I can only speculate as to how efficient it is a storing objects, but having played with a few other similar object databases (Mongodb, db4o). I know that you're going to be able to fit several(5-10) million records before you even get close to that limit. In reality, how many records depends highly on the type of data you're storing.

As an example I was storing ~2million listings & ~1million transactions, in a mysql database and the space was < 1Gb. You have a small overhead serializing a whole object, but not that much.

Files can definitely can be stored on the file system.

Answer 2

I'm aware of one GLASS system that is ~944 MB and has 8.3 million objects, or ~118 bytes per object. At this rate, it can grow to over 36 million objects and stay under 4 GB.

As to "attachments", I'd suggest that even in an RDBMS you should consider storing larger, static data in the file system and referencing it from the database. If you are building a web-based application, serving static content (JPG, CSS, etc.) should be done by your web server (e.g., Apache) rather than through the primary application.

By comparison, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server have no-cost licenses for a 4-GB database.

What do you think would be a good price for the next level?

Answer 3

4gb an issue... I guess you think you're building the next ebay!

Answer 4

If you have multiple simultaneous users with attachments of 5MB you need a separate strategy for them anyway, as each takes about a twentieth second of bandwidth of a GBit ethernet network.