talk announcement: Orthogonal Persistence

[Bill Frantz]

I thought this talk might be of interest.  -  Bill

>Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 10:15:12 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Amer Diwan <diwan@sicily.Stanford.EDU>
>Reply-To: diwan@cs.stanford.edu
>To: colloq@cs.stanford.edu, hosking@cs.purdue.edu
>
>
>This talk will be held in Gates 104 and 10:15 a.m. on 3rd August (Tuesday)
>
>	 PM3: An Orthogonally Persistent Systems Programming Language
>
>				Antony Hosking
>		       Department of Computer Sciences
>			      Purdue University
>
>Persistent programming languages combine  the features of database systems and
>programming languages  to allow the  seamless manipulation of both  short- and
>long-term  data, thus relieving  programmers of  the burden  of distinguishing
>between  data that  is transient  (temporarily  allocated in  main memory)  or
>persistent  (residing  permanently  on  disk).   Secondary  storage  concerns,
>including the  representation and management of persistent  data, are directly
>handled  by   the  programming   language  implementation,  rather   than  the
>programmer.   Moreover,   unlike  traditional  database   systems,  persistent
>programming  languages extend  to  persistent data  all  the data  structuring
>features supported by  the language, not just those  imposed by the underlying
>database system.
>
>I will describe how reachability-based orthogonal persistence can be supported
>even in uncooperative  implementations of languages such as  C++ and Modula-3,
>and  without modification  to  the compiler.   Our  scheme extends  Bartlett's
>mostly-copying garbage collector to manage both transient objects and resident
>persistent  objects, and  to compute  the reachability  closure  necessary for
>stabilization of  the persistent  heap.  It has  been implemented in  PM3: our
>prototype  ofothogonal  persistence for  Modula-3,  supporting persistence  by
>reachability  from  named  persistent  roots.  PM3  has  performance  that  is
>competitive with  comparable, but non-orthogonal, persistent  variants of C++.
>Experimental results, using the OO7 object database benchmarks, offer a direct
>comparison of  performance between PM3  and the SHORE/C++ language  binding to
>the SHORE object store.  These  reveal that the mostly-copying approach offers
>a straightforward  path to  efficient orthogonal persistence  in uncooperative
>environments.  Furthermore, they demonstrate  that the overheads of orthogonal
>persistence  are  not  inherently   more  expensive  than  for  non-orthogonal
>persistence,  and justify  our claim  that orthogonal  persistence  deserves a
>level  of  acceptance  similar  to  that now  emerging  for  automatic  memory
>management  (i.e.,  ``garbage  collection''),  even  in  performance-conscious
>settings.  The consequence will be  safer and more flexible persistent systems
>that do not compromise performance.
>
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