Mnesia is a distributed,

soft real-time Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constrai ...

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

written in the Erlang programming language. It is distributed as part of the

Open Telecom Platform OTP is a collection of useful middleware, libraries, and tools written in the Erlang programming language. It is an integral part of the open-source distribution of Erlang. The name OTP was originally an acronym for Open Telecom Platform, which w ...

Description

As with Erlang, Mnesia was developed by Ericsson for soft real-time distributed and high-availability computing work related to telecoms. It was not intended as a general office-based

data processing Data processing is the collection and manipulation of digital data to produce meaningful information. Data processing is a form of ''information processing'', which is the modification (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an ...

, nor to replace SQL-based systems. Instead Mnesia exists to support Erlang, where DBMS-like persistence is required. It has more in common with embeddable DBMS such as Berkeley DB than with any SQL database server.

Database model

"Rows" in tables are represented as records that contain a key value and a data field. This data field may in turn be a tuple containing an Erlang data structure of any complexity.

Backend types

Mnesia has three inbuilt table types: ram_copies, disc_copies and disc_only_copies.

Ram_copies

Data resides in memory and table size is limited by available memory and are backed b
ETS
(erlang term storage) table.

Disc_copies

Data resides in memory but is also persisted on disk backed by disk_log. Disc_copies were backed b

tables until 30th September 2001 with the release of Erlang R7B-4.

Disc_only_copies

Data resides only on disc and are backed b

(disk version of ETS)

file format uses signed 32-bit integers for file offsets and has a limit of 2GB so do disc_only_copies.

Backend plugins

Due to limits imposed b

support for other backend plugins was suggested b
Ulf Wiger
and these were added to Mnesia. Klarna added the LevelDB backend plugin whil
Aeternity
added the RocksDB backend plugin.

Relational features

The database model is relational, but isn't what someone familiar with SQL might expect. A database contains tables. Relationships between them are modelled as other tables. A key feature of Mnesia's high-availability approach is that tables can be reconfigured within a schema and relocated between nodes, not only while the database is still running, but even while write operations are still going on.

Coding

The query language of Mnesia is Erlang itself, rather than SQL. It permits easy representation of transactions as a natural feature of Erlang by allowing developers to utilize a single language throughout an application.

Transactions

Erlang is a functional language. Mnesia builds on this to obtain

ACID In computer science, ACID ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a sequ ...

transaction Transaction or transactional may refer to: Commerce * Financial transaction, an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between a buyer and a seller to exchange an asset for payment *Debits and credits in a Double-entry bookkeeping sys ...

support. The functional block which is run as a transaction is a commonplace Erlang construct called a ''Functional Object'' (or ''Fun'') and is called by the single Mnesia statement mnesia:transaction(F). This can lead to clearer source code than the paired BEGIN / COMMIT syntax of SQL, and so avoids its problem of unclosed transactions within a procedure. Again as a result of the functional nature of Erlang, nesting transactions is simple. It's also possible to distribute transactions across multiple nodes (i.e. separate servers). The semantics of using transactions in this way remains consistent, making it easy to write library code that works equally in either context. General coding style for Mnesia will always use transactions. For performance reasons, it also supports deliberate "''dirty operations''" which avoid transactions. These compromise the ''atomicity'' and the ''isolation'' properties of

, but offer around 10× more throughput. In addition there are also in-memory alternatives, although these lose the ''durability'' property of

Efficient execution

Mnesia forms part of the LYME web application stack. This is akin to LAMP, but based on Erlang. Implementation in Erlang confers an efficiency benefit because of the use of a single virtual machine throughout an application. LYME makes use of this, since the Yaws web server is also implemented in Erlang.

Address space In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity. For software programs to save and retrieve st ...

is shared (although safely so, under Erlang) between code and data, including Mnesia's table data.

Origins and licensing

Mnesia and Erlang were developed by the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. They have been released as open source software. Mnesia is released under a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. Since OTP 18.0 they are published according to the open source Apache License 2.0. Versions before OTP 18.0 were published under the open source ''Erlang Public License''.

ejabberd

Mnesia is also an option embedded within the Erlang-based Jabber daemon, ejabberd.

References

{{reflist, 30em Erlang (programming language) Free database management systems Structured storage