You definitely do not want to use ns_set for large amounts of data.
If you need to lookup any values in that ns_set by key name, the
performance will suck very, very badly. Remember, time to find a
single key by name in an ns_set scales linearly with ns_set size...
Use a Tcl array or nsv instead.
Extending AOLserver and/or the Tcl Thread Extension's nsv support to
include in memory relational tables, with full ACId guarantees (no D
for Durability of course as it's all in memory only), would be very
nice. Such a feature would have been very convenient in some of the
projects I've done. I don't really care whether it has a SQL query
interface or not, just as long as it has the requisite power.
But, I've never yet had a probject where I really needed such
functionality, I could always get by just with plain old AOLserver
nsvs, which is what I did. It merely would have been very, very nice
to be able to conveniently and efficiently model that in-memory
information relationally.
I hadn't heard of picoSQL before, that's interesting. It claims to be
multi-user, but is it thread safe? Can it be conveniently used
in-memory only rather than writing to disk?
Last I looked,
SQLite
only supports a single write user and so can't be used effectively
from multiple threads.
Metakit
says it does not "offer true concurrent access", but I think
Jean-Claude Wippler plans to make it do so eventually.
It's also unclear how easily either of those could be used as
in-memory databases.
The SLIB Portable Scheme Library has it's own
Relational Database
implementation that might be useful to look at for anyone building
this sort of thing.
