Dan Ezeokoli wrote:
>Our review of the field has identified the open source product
>Erlang/Mnesia by Ericsson (http://www.erlang.org/) as a very interesting
>implementation environment. Mnesia is a state of the art distributed
>object-relational dbms with features that include transparent
>distribution, fault-tollerance, hot code upgrade and schema changes (and
>other features for non-stop systems), distributed transactions,
>distributed incremental backups, very fast (designed for soft realtime
>apps), etc. It would be interesting to discuss what other people think
>of this technology.
All of the features of the Mnesia DBMS listed above are extremely
interesting so I took a brief look at the documentation at the link you
gave. Unfortunately, it appears to have a couple of fatal flaws as a
potential platform for something like our HIS and, I think, for healthcare
software in general: 1) inefficient handling of text
(http://www.erlang.org/faq/x299.html#AEN309), 2) limitation of database size
to 4GB (http://www.erlang.org/faq/x1084.html#AEN1103).
---------------------------------------
Jim Self
Manager and Chief Developer
VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis
(http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
