Development Team/Datastore Rewrite

Goals

Reliability

A good DataStore doesn't lose data easily.

Performance

Queries should be fast enough for the journal to be very responsive when browsing its contents.

Activities should be able to store their data quickly and present a fast UI to their users.

The shell should be able to quickly query the DS to allow the user to resume entries from other views than the journal.

Maintainability

The original implementation tried to achieve goals that were hard and that proved not to be necessary at this stage. This has caused the code base to be unnecessarily complex and several changes to the requirements added considerable confusion to it. We wish to focus the code on what is really needed and do it well.

Custom metadata properties

Activities should be able to store in their entries the metadata they wish, should not be limited to a predefined set.

More efficient file storage

Identical files should be stored just once.

Versioned entries (not fulfilled yet)

Entries may be related in version trees.

Design

Filesystem knows which entries are stored

By examining the directory structure, we know where is localized the data related to each entry. We don't depend any more on a binary structure that could become corrupted and unusable as a whole.

Metadata is stored as a single file for each entry

Each entry has its metadata stored in a single file, so that if corruption happened on one of those, the rest of the entries would be unaffected. The format in which metadata is stored even allows to recover from a malformed property by just dropping it.

Queries are accelerated with a disposable database

This allows us to efficiently query the stored entries, but as we only use the database to accelerate queries, we can drop and recreate it in case of corruption or update to an incompatible database format.

Detect identical files and hard-link them

This improves storage efficiency in general, but in our case is more important because we wish to record in the journal several interactions that refer to the same file. For example, "Downloaded lesson3.pdf", "Read lesson3.pdf", "Sent lesson3.pdf to Juan" would all refer to the same file and we need to only store it once.

Layout on disk

The proposed implementation relies heavily on the data structures provided by the filesystem, thus the layout in which files are disposed on disk is a fundamental part of its design.

Example of a datastore containing 5 entries, two of them referring to the same file (with checksum 464493d8d929436b6152e868867ed451):

1a
      1ab88287-766a-4d98-a7c0-4233dc48647a
            1ab88287-766a-4d98-a7c0-4233dc48647a
                  metadata
2b
      2b90597c-0912-4e7f-8eeb-71a0f004490d
            2b90597c-0912-4e7f-8eeb-71a0f004490d -> checksums/464493d8d929436b6152e868867ed451
                  checksum ~> checksums/464493d8d929436b6152e868867ed451
                  extra_metadata
                        preview
                  metadata
3c
      3cdf5f0e-7595-4166-b1f9-cbedfcfe1c4a
            3cdf5f0e-7595-4166-b1f9-cbedfcfe1c4a -> checksums/464493d8d929436b6152e868867ed451
                  checksum ~> checksums/464493d8d929436b6152e868867ed451
                  extra_metadata
                        preview
                  metadata
4d
      4db11d29-2f07-4452-bd8e-22a6a483ac19
            4db11d29-2f07-4452-bd8e-22a6a483ac19
                  metadata
                  extra_metadata
                        preview
5e
      5e9f2027-b41e-4015-a848-6b3972193eb8
            5e9f2027-b41e-4015-a848-6b3972193eb8
                  metadata
                  extra_metadata
                        preview
checksums

index