I tend to only find time to work on RageDB at night. Staring at code in CLion using the “Darcula” theme works great. But like a vampire exposed to direct sunlight, things go horribly wrong when I try to test what I am working on using the RageDB front-end. You see, besides the code-editor, the rest of the interface is very bright. Blindingly so:
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I’m still trying to figure out the right look for the language folks will use to talk to RageDB. Instead of waiting until I have it figured out, I decided I should write all the queries for the LDBC SNB Benchmark to prepare for a full run in the next few months. Now that we added “stored procedures” to RageDB, the benchmark code is trivial. I send a post request to the Lua url with the name of the query plus any parameters it may need which are in a CSV file. Here is Short Query 4 for example and they all look like this besides the different parameters:
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I was watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and one of the more jarring issues of the first two episodes is that Midge keeps getting arrested for the things she says. It reminded me of the song “Me So Horny” from 2 Live Crew that landed the hip hop group in jail charged with obscenity. Record store owners were getting arrested for selling CDs to undercover cops. How insane does that all sound? But it strikes the point that language matters. The things we say and how we say them are powerful. They convey meaning and emotion, language can be pleasant or it can be foul.
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I’ve written a ton of SQL and Cypher queries over the last 20 years…and I’ve rewritten those queries as stored procedures more times than I can count. The issues with the expressivity of the query language and the ability of the query optimizer to “do the right thing” have been around longer than my career. I’ve written about this problem before. I went so far as to completely give up. In RageDB I let the developer write the query in a programming language directly. Skipping the “middle man” and letting the user be the query optimizer. Because in the end… this is what always happens. Well almost always.
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There was a show called “30 Days” where people would be inserted in to a lifestyle completely different from their beliefs to see what would happen. The idea wasn’t so much to change their mind, but to help them (and the viewer) understand a little bit of both sides. My experience with Declarative Query languages so far has led me to the belief that they were ultimately a performance dead end. I’ve always known more than the database, which allowed me to hand-craft high performance queries using stored procedures. Building RageDB I decided to stay away from query languages, going as far as letting you write part of your query in “c” if you wanted to.
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Back in February, we added the ability to load a CSV file and alter the contents while importing it. We also added Date support to RageDB using a Lua library. This was a masterful job of copy and paste and got us lots of functionality very quickly. When we timed the import for LDBC SNB SF10 it came in at 28 minutes. Which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great. Let’s try to speed that up today.
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Typically we want to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to help the environment. But today we are going to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle the Lua Sandbox Environment to give us two additional sets of permissions. The first is “Read Write” in which a user can read and write to the database but cannot create new types of nodes or relationships or data types. The second is “Read Only” which does what it sounds like.
While we’re here, we’re going to one graph, two graph, rage graph, blue graph our way to multi database support. Let’s jump in:
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The idea of using a programing language as the way to write queries against the database makes many security folks hyperventilate. In order to lower their heart-rate and slow their breathing we have to limit the queries using a technique known as “sandboxing“. The Sol2 library we are using in RageDB lets us create an “environment” where our queries will run. Let’s see how we go about doing this.
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“That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies” — Alfred Tennyson. Before embarking on the journey of achieving something great, you are often told to imagine having already done it. This is the pseudo scientific belief that visualizing a positive outcome helps one achieve it. It propelled “The Secret” to sell 30 million copies worldwide. However, it isn’t the outcome we are supposed to be fantasizing about, but rather the execution of the actions required to accomplish our goal.
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Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Written by Blaise Pascal is often misattributed to Mark Twain. It reminds us to try to be brief. Too many people never learn this.
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