← Back to context

Comment by dotancohen

8 hours ago 

  > I think JavaScript would benefit from an in-memory database.

That database would probably look a lot like a JSON object. What are you suggesting, that a global JSON object does not solve?

4 comments

dotancohen

Reply
austin-cheney  8 hours ago

Whether it is an object, array, something else, or a combination thereof is a design decision. It is not so much about the design of the structure, which should be determined by execution performance considerations, but how information is added, removed and retrieved. Gathering one or more records from a JSON object, or array index, by value of some child property somewhere in a descendant structure of the instance index always feels like a one-off based upon the shape of the data. That could just be a query which is more elegant to read and yet still achieves superior execution performance compared to a bunch of nested loops or string of function array methods.

The more structures you have in a given application and the larger those structures become in their schemas the more valuable a uniform storage and retrieval solution becomes.

  • pocksuppet  5 hours ago

    Okay, what would your solution look like?

        from cities select state where name='Chicago'

    isn't really different from

        cities.filter(x=>x.name=='Chicago').map(x=>x.state)

    • austin-cheney  1 hour ago

      Thinking small. In SQL databases a well put together database instance will typically have tables that with a single incrementing primary key column and some secondary key columns that point to unique records on other tables. That is the relational part of RDBMS.

      Its not about what it looks like. Arrays have fancy functional methods, but not object structures. Its more about whether it executes faster and comprises fewer steps to read/write. A real case in my application is get all ports associated with unencrypted sockets associated with servers of a given type and sort the output in a manner chosen by the user. The data in this case is in different unrelated objects whose properties point to each other in various ways by identity, because each server and socket uses hashes for unique identifiers.