More Flightwish.com (Our secret project)

I’ve just started some rather major surgery on the flightwish.com code base. For the launch at the end of the month we will be completely redoing all of the web look & feel. The current one still feels a lot like a “demo”, so we’re redesigning it into something that looks as great as it feels to use. I’m also in the process of overhauling the entire database layer, since the current one chews through far to much memory for my liking. It’s moving onto EoD SQL, with a very simple caching system I’ve been working on.

Keep a look out to see what comes up at the end of the month

Embedded Database in the OS?

I used to hate databases. I really did. You’d never guess it today would you?

The basic reason was: I didn’t actually understand them, and I couldn’t really code SQL. Over the past few years my use of databases has escalated dramatically, and with it: my understanding of relationships, sets and SQL. With my gain in understanding, I’ve formulated the idea that it would be really cool if the OS came with an embedded database. Each application can reference it from the same “location” (whether it be on the disk, an API, socket, pipe or whatever). Each application auto-magically gets it’s own database, and can check if it’s a “new” (unpopulated) database.

For games it would be great for stats gathering; for music software it would be great for collection management (Amarok uses SQLite); you get the idea. Once the application is uninstalled, it’s database is dumped and compressed. Archived databases are stored for say 6 months and then deleted (in case you re-install the software). Lets face it, storage on disk is cheap in most instances.

Part of these thoughts revolve around my ideas for the ideal OS, based mostly on Java (though probably native compiled for performance). Where the database could be a simple JNDI lookup for applications.