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Java In-Memory Persistence with Space4J

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Space4J is a simple database system that will let you work with Java Collections in memory. Since memory is several orders of magnitude faster than disk for random access to data, Space4J provides better scalability for "real-time" web applications and systems that require performance.

With Space4J Instead of having to perform a SQL SELECT to fetch a User from a database table, the developer accesses the users map (java.util.Map) and calls users.get(id). Since all data is kept in memory inside the JVM, there is no need for an extra database application, a socket connection, a JDBC driver, a SQL statement or any kind of ORM tool. Data is just there, inside objects, inside Java maps. For operations that modify data a Command object is created and then serialized and saved to disk in a log file. At restart the past commands are read from the log files and re-applied, generating the exact same data set you had for example before a system crash.

In order to prevent log files from becoming huge from time to time the application can take a snapshot of all data to disk. Space4J keeps all data inside the Space object. When taking a snapshot, the whole Space object is serialized and saved to disk. Therefore at restart only the commands since the last snapshot need to be re-applied, not all of them.  The size of the snapshot will depend on the application. Also the system has to enter read-only mode when saving the snapshot to disk, unless a Space4J cluster is used. An example of such a deployment would be a web application in load balance, where every web server would have its own Space4J node from a cluster

Space4J comes with a complete indexing framework that supports four different types of indexes to search data in a variety of ways. Also it can be used alongside a regular database  for offline work, data  warehousing, reports, etc.

Space4J uses the Java 1.6 concurrent data structures for concurrent read/write access to data so writers only block writers, readers don't block or get blocked by anything. This means that modifications are done one at a time while read-access operations are done concurrently without any ConcurrentModification exceptions!

 You can download the latest release (0.9.1) or browse through the source repository.

For a more information regarding the emerging paradigm of shifting data access from disk to memory for performance and other data access issues, you can read “RAM is the new disk...” by Steven Robbins, here at InfoQ.

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