Progress

I recently left my day job to work on the Didget system full time. My small team has made a number of changes to the project since the last blog post, but progress has been slow when so many other things get in the way. I have now been able to accelerate the development and testing greatly.

Here is a list of some new features that have been added over the past two years.

1) Added ability to do JOIN operations on our database tables.

2) Added direct connectors to external databases so we can create DB tables by querying those databases directly. In earlier versions, the user had to export the data into CSV files from those databases and then import those files into our system.

3) Added ability to transform data within database tables. We can now create new columns that are transformations of other columns. For example we can uppercase, lowercase, substitute, split, combine, convert, truncate, trim, etc.

4) Added a 'Folder' container type so that the data stream for every Didget is stored in a separate file. This helps with testing and lets us do more 'apples to apples' comparisons with file system operations.

5) Added more complex SQL query operations. We can now combine lots of AND and OR operations like "SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE Name LIKE '%son' AND Address ILIKE '%123%' OR ZipCode < 10000;" We made it very easy to create and save these queries.

6) Tuned a bunch of operations to be faster. SQL queries now execute even faster and often require less data to be read from disk. Many of our database queries are now about twice as fast as MySQL or PostgreSQL when performed on the same data set on the same machine. Again, we don't need any indexes to often outperform a fully indexed table in those other database systems.