Postgres rewritten in elixir.
Yeah, if you're feeling frisky.
It is many things. This repository is set up to allow for the development of an elixir codebase that is functionally indistingusible from the official postgres implementation. Cowbird uses the postgres test suite to ensure that all features that matter in postgres get covered.
I think that there is more for me to learn plumbing the depths of a well established codebase and ecosystem than there is for me to go through the exercise of writing my own sql implementation and database from scratch.
Postgres is the most well used, well respected and well documented open source SQL database avaliable (do not @ me).
I heard elixir was the hot new thing and wanted to try it out. I had tried to write a version of cowbird in clojure previously and had a difficult time getting anywhere all too interesting, especially when dealing with binary protocols. I bought the rust book and started trying to reimplement cowbird in that language but it got a bit overwhelming so I stopped. Elixir is my next try, so let's see what happens.
In nature, a cowbird is a bird that lays eggs in the nests of other birds. Beyond the act of creating the egg and putting it in another nest, the noble cowbird has no role in raising or parenting its offspring. Likewise, in software, a cowbird is a codebase that uses another codebase's test suite and documentation instead of its own. Writing good documentation and good tests is actual work that I would have to be compensated for doing. A cowbird takes the resources and established nature of a mature software project and allows me to focus on the act of creation and learning instead of the sobering responsbilities of explaining what I am doing and maintaining the codebase as people use it out in the wild. Lifetimes of work years have been put into other databases and I would rather use their ghosts than make my own.
In the traditional way, you mostly cannot contribute. Pull requests may be accepted, but they are not strictly encouraged either. While this effort might produce a drop in replacement for postgres, that's not the point. The point is for me personally to learn more about a particular database and a particular language. So the best way for you to contribute to this effort, would be to pick a different database than postgres or a different language than elixir and make a new cowbird and see what you end up learning. I've found this exercise to be very helpful for me personally and I would encourage you to explore something indepedent enough that you are out on your own for a bit.
git clone git@github.com:zmaril/cowbird.git
cd cowbird
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd resources/postgres
./configure
make
cd ../..
mix regress #custom mix task that builds the escripts executables and then runs the postgres regression test suite
- The parser for postgres' binary protocol.
- The parser for postgres' sql implementation.
- Some notes I've written up.