Comment by bob1029
5 years ago
Modeling the DOM in SQL... Further evidence that anything we can imagine has some stable representation in third normal form. Is it fast? Maybe not. But is it correct? Provably.
5 years ago
Modeling the DOM in SQL... Further evidence that anything we can imagine has some stable representation in third normal form. Is it fast? Maybe not. But is it correct? Provably.
There was a group that rewrote the Chromium DOM itself in a data oriented design (which learns from database design and sort of applies to cache utilization and locality) and got a 6X speedup in some places:
https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/slides/2018/Data-oriented%20desi...
This paper is basically what we do, except we have a big container type, aptly named "Domain.cs". Inside, you will find a public List<T> of every type. We decided to emulate SQL throughout the vertical (i.e. each List is a table) in order to make mapping to SQL a trivial affair. None of our Domain types contains any complex type as a property. Everything can go 1:1 to SQL. We use LINQ (or SQL) to produce projections as appropriate.
There isn't actually just 1 big domain instance either. It's more like one per user session, and then a global instance.
The impact this had on reducing complexity and bugs is incredible. I haven't seen a null ref exception in a long time. Also, being able to dump your entire universe to disk by serializing a single object is really nice.