[Oz] Using Oz for large databases

[Peter Van Roy]

> 
> The current system has the following ways of handling large amounts of data:
> 
> 1. In RAM.  The current system has 32-bit addressing, and due to the
>    tagging and GC schemes, a program can have a maximum of 512MB of active
>    data at any instant.  Within this limit, data structures can be of almost
>    arbitrary size.  To verify this, I created just now a dictionary of 1000000
>    elements and did some operations with it.  (An Alpha port that does full
>    64-bit addressing is in progress.)
> 

To be precise, 512MB per *site*.  A distributed program can have this much
memory per site (where a site = OS process), and it is easy to spread out
data over multiple sites in a way transparent to the program (e.g., by
building a 'distributed dictionary' abstraction in Oz using the Remote
module).  This is a crude but effective way of increasing total active RAM
size, especially since the Remote module supports IPC very efficiently by
letting new processes communicate via shared memory if possible.

Peter Van Roy
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