MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf

murphee ends along a report from InfoQ: "Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone's Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There's also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone's Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev."

I'm sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

Shot in the dark

[smittyoneeach]

"MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf"
Some magnetic levitation involving rubies, VM (Ware?), more gems, object oriented databases (didn't they die?), World of Warcraft, rails (magnetic levitation again?), and, finally, conference.
Doesn't the Lameness Filter usually take care of this sort of thing?

Re:Ruby Shootout

[Anonymous Coward]

"precedence" is not sane - it's a complicated set of exceptions that make a programing language more complicated to implement, but don't really gain anything. If the only thing you can think of against smalltalk is not implementing mathematical precedence rules, then you're scratching at straws.

Ruby's syntax is not better than smalltalk - it's more complicated. the only thing "better" about it, is that it sometimes vaguely resembles C syntax.

If you spent ten minute with Smalltalk's syntax you'd realise that it's 1. very small, 2. very consistent. which means that you can learn the _entire_ syntax in one sitting. Beyond that, it's all just API.
That's where Smalltalk has its advantage, because 99% of the language is API, adding to the language doesn't require compiler changes.

Re:Sounds cool, but not open

[rossifer]

Its a True OODBMS which is exactly the model that the ORM layers in frameworks like rails are attempting to simulate on a relational database.

That's a very silly statement.

I don't use an ORM to simulate an OODBMS. I use an ORM so that I have a system with both Object Oriented and Relational programming models and can use either one when appropriate. There are a lot of people who don't understand the value of Relational programming, and they think that those of us using RDBMS's would really prefer OODBMS's if only we could see the light...

Drink the kool-aid is more like.

I have yet to see a problem simple enough that I would choose to use an OODBMS over an RDBMS while simultaneously being interesting enough that I would bother working on it in the first place.

But maybe I'm just being grumpy. Bah.

news that matters?

[nguy]

Gemstone is a proprietary implementation of Smalltalk and an associated object database. Who does it matter to whether they incorporate a RubyVM into their system or not?

Gemstone also stands for the failure of a particular kind of business model. These people (and others) had a mature OO programming language that was orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, had object persistence, had a great IDE, and supported distributed programming over 15 years ago, and they pissed it all away by making it too expensive and too proprietary.

Because the Smalltalk vendors were greedy and squabbling among themselves, modern OOP arrived more than a decade later in in much poorer form.

I suppose hiding their Smalltalk heritage by calling their system "Gemstone/S" and being forced to incorporate Ruby in order to make their platform attractive is the ultimate indignity.

Re:news that matters?

[angdraug]

You can download GemStone/S 64 Web Edition for free, and use it free (for commercial use, too!). Only when your database grows beyond about 2 gigs, you need to get a license, which is about $7000 a year.

Nowhere near good enough. $7000 a year is the exact outrage the previous poster was talking about. And 2 gigs is not much if you consider that it has to hold all your objects and their fleas. Not to mention that it's not really free (as in freedom) until it can be found in Debian/main.

Re:OODB, oh oh

[Tablizer]

What are those "problematic ideas" you are taling about and how does an RDBMS help us with analyzing large tree and/or graph datasets, knowledge bases and other forms of data that does not fit the relational model?

It is possible to add declarative tree/graph traversal to a query language, and Oracle does a little bit of this. Plus, "node hopping", if needed, can be done in a relational database just as well as a non-relational one. Its just that existing implementations are not optimized for them. But thats an implementation limit, not a flaw in relational theory itself.

I will agree there may be places where relational may not work so smooth, but the claims by many OODBMS proponents is that OODBMS should *replace* RDBMS, not merely fill in the side-niches where relational has difficulties. If you are a "side nicher", then we can come to a truce.