Elephant 0.9 now available

June 7th, 2007

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Download it now!

Elephant 0.9 is a significant improvement in stability, platform support and feature set over Elephant 0.6.0, our last major release. This release should be considered a stable release, and any major bugs that are uncovered will be accommodated by a patch release.

Major Features of Elephant 0.9

• Expanded and improved platform support
  • SBCL 1.0, Allegro 8.0/7.0, Lispworks 5.0 and OpenMCL 1.0
  • Elephant has been verified on every major OS (Linux, Mac OS X or Windows) for which these lisps are available
  • New support for 64-bit lisps and improved support for Unicode
  • Elephant is now thread-safe under both BDB and SQL data stores
  • A wide set of configurations have now been validated.
• New datastructures and interfaces
  • Persistent sets - lightweight collections with a simple API
  • Mapping operators - Efficient, cons free access to btrees, sets and class indices
• All new users manual
  • A new, basic tutorial incorporating the major new features
  • Expanded user guide for specific features
  • A new rough guide to the internal APIs for developers
• Other benefits or features
  • Simplified user configuration using a single file, my-config.sexp
  • Proper upgrades from 0.6, via the ability to open 0.6 databases in 0.9
  • The Berkeley DB backend is up-to-date with the latest library version and requires Berkeley DB 4.5
  • A host of performance improvements, bug fixes and minor feature enhancements (see the development list or prior announcements for some of the details)

Roadmap

We are planning a string of interim releases between 0.9 and 1.0, but we recommend that people using Elephant for active web sites and important applications use 0.9 until 1.0 is available. We will not guarantee clean upgrades between 0.9.x releases if the database format changes and cannot guarantee the same level of stability outside these major release milestones. The features planned for the 1.0 release of Elephant are recorded as tickets at the Trac project site.

Visit the documentation page to read the new reference manual and the download page to get the release.

Elephant 0.9 RC1 announced

April 30th, 2007

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With the marked improvement in stability and functionality of the code base, the maintainers have decided to abandon the 0.6.1 release label and change the upcoming release to 0.9. This change puts us on a new roadmap leading to a 1.0 release later in 2007.

New features and improvements in release 0.9 RC1

Additional features integrated since the Beta 0.6.1 announcement:

• Full platform support
  • SBCL 1.0, Allegro 8.0/7.0, Lispworks 5.0 and OpenMCL 1.0
  • All these lisps should work on every major OS (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) they are released on
  • A wide set of configurations has been tested.
  • 64-bit support has been validated, but not recently and not on all platforms (testers welcome!)
• Mapping operators
  • BTrees, BTree indicies, class index and slot/derived indices all have a map operation
  • Enable mapping a function over values and ranges
  • Map in both ascending and descending order
  • Collect function results into a list
  • Efficient stack allocation where appropriate
• Persistent sets
  • A lighter-weight API for persistent collections
  • Provides insert, remove, find, map and list operations
  • With appropriate methods, makes one to many slots easy to construct, see tutorial and user-guide for details.
• Complete update and rewrite of the users manual
  • All new and up-to-date tutorial
  • New section containing more detailed implementation information for advanced users
  • New sections for prospective data store developers
  • Detailed installation instructions (supercedes INSTALL file)
  • A list of use case scenarios that should help developers understand Elephant better
  • Much work remains to clean up the manual for 1.0, but the bulk of the rewrite is done and we invite comment on what is missing or unclear.
• Feature tweaks
  • Drop commands for persistent collections to reclaim storage for reuse.
  • Expanded support for nested aggregates in serializer and migrate (i.e. an array of persistent objects will be properly migrated, before only btree collections of persistent objects were properly copied).
  • Better error handling during object creation, change class operations, etc.
  • Better error checking during cross-store operations.
  • Persistent instances passed to print-object print their oid by default to create a recognizable signature
  • And much more...
• Performance enhancements
  • Option to increase cache size for BDB backend
  • Improve contention performance while mapping btrees
  • Improved map performance
  • And much more...

Beta 0.6.1 Release available via CVS

March 21st, 2007

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Supported Platforms

• See the platform page for details
• OpenMCL will be verified as part of the beta cycle
• CMU should work, but there are no users so it is not officially supported

Download and Install

The beta release will only be available via CVS. Download the latest development HEAD.

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/elephant/cvsroot checkout elephant

This will put the elephant release into the directory 'elephant'. Read the INSTALL, UPGRADE and UPGRADE-BDB files for further instructions.

Purpose of the beta release

The tree is effectively a release candidate. We only need to verify OpenMCL, beef up the documentation and examples and make sure we have good test coverage. Otherwise this code base appears stable enough to release.

New features in 0.6.1

The beta release is a more stable version of the feature set in the alpha release. A list of the changes between alpha and beta can be found in the doc/oldfiles/TODO file.

Alpha 0.6.1 Release available via CVS

February 20th, 2007

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Supported platforms:

• SBCL, Allegro, CMU, OpenMCL, Lispworks (build system is not automated for Windows)
• CMU, OpenMCL and Lispworks have not been fully tested and may require minor bug fixes

Download and Install

The alpha release will only be available via CVS

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/elephant/cvsroot checkout -r ELEPHANT-0-6-1-alpha elephant

This will put the elephant release into the directory: elephant. Read the INSTALL, UPGRADE and UPGRADE-BDB files for further instructions.

Purpose of the alpha release

The primary developers do not have ready access to all supported platforms and would like to ask the community to help validate the current implementation on other platforms. We also are using the alpha to improve up our test suite. For more details please see the TODO file. If you have a favorite feature such as multi-threading, 64-bit, etc., please free to submit a test for the test suite.

New features in 0.6.1

• Simplified build and site configuration support:
  • See config.sexp in root directory for site customization (no more editing code files)
  • Linux and Mac systems should automatically build libraries when asdf is called
• 64-bit lisps are now supported
• 64-bit and 32-bit lisps can read and run off the same database files (on the same machine)
• Multithreading
• Elephant should now be thread safe, including sharing a single store-controller across threads
• Read comments in src/elephant/transactions.lisp and BDB users should read src/db-bdb/bdb-transactions.lisp
• Improved support for mixing transactions and store-controllers
• Upgrading
• Elephant 0.6.1 can open and directly manipulate 0.6.0 databases
• Existing 0.6.0 databases can be upgraded via the 'upgrade' function which takes
• Upgrading is required for 64-bit systems
• New serializer-independant metadata should enable future upgrades easier
• NOTE: There may be some problems upgrading SQL databases
• Berkeley DB backend
• BDB 4.5 required (see UPGRADE-BDB)
• *auto-commit* is no longer required. All data access methods auto-commit if there is no active transaction
• store-controller accepts :deadlock-detect keyword (t or nil) which will run db_deadlock as a background process to abort deadlocked threads
• optimize-storage is a new store-controller method currently supported by BDB backend. It compacts a whole database or only a specific BTree and returns free pages to the free list or to the file system.
• Minor features
• Re-organization to the internal structure in this release
• Renaming including removing defunct sleepycat naming scheme, backend packages, etc.
• The serializer was modularized to allow future releases to change serializer
• strategies or implement custom serializers and to be able to open legacy databases
• Remove various warnings in SBCL build, etc.
• Separated utilities into their own package and directory
• Serializer improvements
• 0.6.1 databases can be shared across lisps running on hardware of the same endianness
  (i.e. all x86 platforms or PPC/Alpha, etc)
• Simplified unicode serialization support across all platforms
• Performance improvements in multi-threading situations
• Pushing :elephant-without-optimize onto *features* will disable optimization declarations and simplifying debugging
• Other fixes and features documented in the TODO file

See the downloads page for more information.

Release 0.6.0 Available

May 27th, 2006

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The latest version is 0.6.0, is offically released as of May 27, 2006. It has been tested on a variety of lisp implementations and with a variety of storage repositories. This release is mainly the work of Ian Eslick, and offers a significant refactoring as well as the very convenient feature of automatic slot indexing. Julian Stecklina submitted a patch for FreeBSD which is in the CVS repository now but not in the 0.6.0 release.