Hi folks,

to avoid legal issues with some other Avocado lovers we have to change the name of our database. We want to stick to Avocados and selected a variety from Mexico/Guatemala called “Arango”.

Frank has given a short lightning talk on using mruby in ArangoDB (at this time still called AvocadoDB) at the Cologne Ruby user group.

I’m still investigating the possibility to use mruby as embedded language for AvocadoDB, see me last post. I managed to create an interactive shell to play with mruby. Now am trying to do some performance tests. Note that mruby is still “alpha”, so DO NOT take these test to seriously. They are basically just for me to learn, how to use mruby.

Exposing a C function to MRUBY

The first function I need is a timing function. I’ve implemented such a function in C using gettimeofday. Now in order to make it..

In my last post I investigated the possibility of using mruby as embedded language for AvocadoDB. As the first results look quite promising I decided to write a small interactive mruby shell. There is no better way to explore a new toy than to play with it.(Un)fortunately “irb” from Ruby is written in Ruby itself, so one cannot just use it for mruby. So, instead I had to write a small C++ program using “readline” and the compile/execute functions from mruby. In order to implement a Read-Eval-Print-Loop, well, one needs the print. That in itself is more complicated than expected, see the ..

Introduction

One of the design goals of AvocadoDB is:

Use AvocadoDB as an application server and fuse your application and database together for maximal throughput

In order to act as application server, AvocadoDB has a build in language, currently JavaScript. As mruby became publically available a few hours ago, I started to see if can be viable alternative. This blog post summarizes my finding.

Status Quo

AvocadoDB acts as HTTP server. Each request is parsed, routed, and passed to a small piece of..

The REST API for AvocadoDB is already available and stable and people are writing APIs using it. Awesome. As AvocacoDB offers more complex data structures like graphs and lists REST is not enough. We implemented a first version of a query language some time ago which is very similar to SQL and UNQL.

UNQL started with quite some hype last year. However, after some burst of activity the project came to a hold. So it seems, that – at least as a project – UNQL has been a failure. IMHO one of the major issues with the current UNQL is, that it tries to cover everything in NoSQL, from key-value stores to document-stores to graph-database. Basically you end up with greatest common divisor – namely key-value access. But with graph structures and also document-structures you really want to supports joins,..

Last week AvocadoDB got mentioned in “nosql weekly” and the project achieved a huge amount of public interest especially from Japan. Awesome! 🙂

In this context Mr. Fiber asked on twitter what the use of skip list indices in AvocadoDB is. Here’s a short video reply by chief architect martin Schoenert. Got an opinion on this? – we’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Cambridge mathematician Richard R. Parker presents a novel algorithm he has developed using a Hilbert curve and Polyhedrons to efficiently implement geo-indexing.