CFH: Mariposa, distributed DB

This is a Call For Hackers:

Some time ago, I floated a little discussion on this list about doing
some distributed database work with PostgreSQL. The project got back
burnered at work, but now has a timeline for needing a solution "this
summer."  Recent discussions on this list about Postgres's historical
object roots got me back to the Berkeley db sites, and reminded me about
Mariposa, which is Stonebraker's take on distributed DBs.

http://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:8000:8000/mariposa/

StoneBraker has gone on to commercialize Mariposa as Cohera, which seems
to be one of those Enterprise Scale products where if you need to ask
how much a license costs, you can't afford it ;-)

Sounds like now would be a good time to re-visit Mariposa, and see what
good ideas can be folded over into PostgreSQL.  Mariposa was funded by
ARPA and ARO, and was used by NASA as the database part of the Sequoia
Project, which became Big Sur, looking to unify the various kinds of
geophysical data collected by earth observing missions.

The code is an offshoot of Postgres95, with lots of nasty '#ifdef P95's
scattered around. The split predates lots of good work by the PostgreSQL
team to clean up years of academic cruft that had accumulated, so merging
is not trivial.

Anyway, anyone interested in taking a look at this with me? I think the
place to start (i.e., where I'm starting) is to get the June-1996 alpha
release of Mariposa to compile on a current system (I'm running Linux
myself.) I've been doing a compare-and-contrast, staring at source code,
but I think I need a running system to decide how the parts fit together.

Then, plan what features to 'fold' into pgsql, and run a proposal past
this list, some time later in the 7.x series, perhaps in a couple of
months (you guys will probably be on 8.x by then!) Hopefully, not take-up
too much of the core developers time until we're talking integration.

Anyone else interested, I'm using the tarball from:

ftp://epoch.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/mariposa/src/alpha-1/mariposa-alpha-1.tar.gz

If this really takes off, I can host CVS of the mariposa and pgsql
sources, as well as web pages, mailing list, whatever. If it's just a
couple of us (or me all by myself ;-) we'll keep it simple.

Ross
-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005