Long-term storage of values

[Dario Teixeira <darioteixeira@yahoo.com>]

Hi,

Suppose I have a value of type Story.t, fairly complex in its definition.
I wish to store this value in a DB (like Postgresql) for posterity.
At the moment, I am storing in the DB the marshalled representation
of the data; whenever I need to use it again in the Ocaml programme
I simply fetch it from the DB and unmarshal it.

This works fine; there is however one nagging problem: the marshalled
representation is brittle.  If Story.t changes even slightly, I will
no longer be able to retrieve values marshalled with the old version.

Note that changes to Story.t are likely to be small and will not
invalidate backwards compatibility (e.g., here or there another
variant might be added, but not removed or renamed).

I am therefore looking for an alternative to marshalling that a) does
not suffer from the brittleness problem, and b) is fast.  At the
moment, the best thing that occurs to me is to convert the data into
XML and to store it as such in the DB (the data is easily converted
into XML).

This strikes me as problem bound to be common.  How do you guys typically
solve this sort of situation?  In addition, if the XML route is indeed
the best one, what Ocaml tools would you recommend?  (Again, this is
for an application where speed is of the essence).

Thanks in advance for your input!
Cheers,
Dario Teixeira





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