Which is great, except it just means I'm right back where I was two months ago with my previous jSuneido immudb milestone. As usual, it feels like I only started on this a couple of weeks ago.
Except that hopefully I've fixed the database growth and transaction conflict issues.
I haven't implemented the idea of passing the table select predicate down to the transaction so it can use it for read validation. But even without this, the conflict detection should be at least as fine grained as cSuneido (and much better than previous versions of jSuneido).
I'm almost to the point where my strangler fig approach has taken over the old immudb code and I should go back and clean it all up so I have a single version. I can't see needing the old immudb version again (and it'll be in version control if I do).
The last problem I ran into was a tricky one. In order to defer btree updates till commit, I use transaction local btrees. Which means to access an index you have to look at both the local and the global btrees. To do this I use an iterator that merges two other iterators. Iterating through two sorted sequences in parallel is a standard easy problem. But Suneido allows you to bidirectionally step forwards or backwards in any order with the same iterator. And it turns out that this makes iterating in parallel a lot tougher. The trick is when you change directions. The final code is not that large (look at next and prev in MergeIndexIter) but I went through about six different versions before I finally got one that appears to work. Of course, most of my previous versions also appeared to work, until I added more test cases.
A big part of finally figuring this out was coming up with the right visualization for it. Here's what I ended up with:
Notice it's paper and pencil. (It should have been on graph paper but I so seldom do stuff on paper anymore that I didn't have any handy.) I would have preferred to do it digital, but I couldn't think of an easy way to do it. I could have done it in a drawing program or even a spreadsheet or word processor, but it would have been a hassle. Drawing programs make it possible to do just about anything, but they'd don't tend to make it easy and natural (at least, if you only use them occasionally like me). Maybe there's a market niche for someone to go after. Or maybe there already is a good program for doing this - anyone know one?
Given the extra complexity, I started to question whether Suneido needed to allow you to switch directions with an iterator. I can only think of a couple of places where we use this. But I'll leave that question for another day.
And now back to testing. I imagine I've still got a few bugs lurking in there. I also need to do some testing and see whether I've actually solved the database growth problem. It may be harder to know whether the transaction issue is solved until we actually get it in production.
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