Database Tools

AllegroCache - Object Persistence in Lisp

The enabling technology behind Allegro Common Lisp's persistent objects is a high-performance, scalable, dynamic object-caching database. It allows programmers to work directly with objects as if they were in memory while in fact the object data is always stored on disk. It supports fully ACID-compliant transaction mode with both long and short transactions. It automatically maintains referential integrity of complex object networks. AllegroCache provides 64-bit real-time data caching on the application memory to achieve very high data access throughput over as large a data set as required./p



• Persistent CLOS Objects in all Allegro Common Lisp -- Class definitions are stored as first class objects in the database
• Dynamic Schema Evolution -- Redefine classes on the fly, persistent objects are lazily updated when accessed
• Standalone & Client Server -- Single user on local disk or multiple clients talking to single server over sockets
• Native lisp btrees -- Comparable in speed with BerkeleyDB, with more control
• Transactional model -- All ACID features, commit/rollback, and optimistic concurrency
• Supports databases with billions of objects (and Terabytes of Data)
• Bulk Loading -- Improved performance adding objects to the database
• Transaction Logging -- Restore databases after power failure or disk crash
• Expression Cursors -- Iterate over a set of instances that satisfy a predicate over multiple slots of an instance
• Range Queries -- Retrieve objects with slots that match a range of values
• Convenient macros to loop over classes, maps and sets
• Indexed slots -- A mapping from slot-values to objects, retrieve objects and object ids (oid)
• Maps -- Transactionally safe persistent hashtables
• Sets -- Persistent large collections of objects
• Supports most common datatypes -- Including unsigned-byte 8 arrays, maps and sets
• Object ID's unique for the lifetime of the database -- User accessible
• Dump the database into XML files
• Restore database from the XML dump
• User controlled caching -- For the size of the btrees and the total number of objects stored in the cache

Do More with the Data

The dynamic, object-oriented nature of Lisp makes it an ideal development language to handle disparate data types in today's applications. The Allegro Common Lisp family of products also provides reliable, high-performance and scalable connections to most other popular databases.

Allegro Oracle Direct Connect

Provides direct, high-performance access to Oracle databases (versqion 8 or higher) using the Oracle C Interface (OCI) libraries from Oracle, without needing ODBC.

• Allows many connections to the same or different databases
• Connections can be made in blocking or non-blocking modes
• Requires Oracle Client Libraries be installed (free from Oracle)

Allegro MySQL Direct Connect

Provides direct, high-performance access to MySQL databases without needing ODBC.

• Speaks the same client protocol used in all other languages that work with the MySQL server
• Access to the network data buffers, when data is returned by the MySQL server
• No need to allocate space for intermediate forms of data (as needed in a multi-level interface)
• Has a set of macros to make it easy to create queries at runtime

Allegro ODBC

Provides a universal interface between Lisp applications and relational databases such as SQL Server, Access and Sybase.

• Ensures portability of database application using Microsoft's ODBC
• Concurrently accesses multiple, heterogeneous databases
• Allows Lisp code in the middle of a query to better customize requests
• Minimizes allocation of Lisp objects needed to hold database results
• Parameterizes inserts in cached SQL for faster processing
• Supports SQL transactions
• Requires ODBC drivers that support either the V2.0 or the V3.0 ODBC definition

NDBM Database Interface

An interface to the simple collection of dabatase tools provided by Unix and similar operating systems.

• Provides an interface to the Unix ndbm library
• Not recommended for complex database requirements
• Not available on Microsoft Windows