mentat/core/src
Nick Alexander 15b4195a6e Schema alteration. Fixes #294 and #295. (#370) r=rnewman
* Pre: Don't retract :db/ident in test.

Datomic (and eventually Mentat) don't allow to retract :db/ident in
this way, so this runs afoul of future work to support mutating
metadata.

* Pre: s/VALUETYPE/VALUE_TYPE/.

This is consistent with the capitalization (which is "valueType") and
the other identifier.

* Pre: Remove some single quotes from error output.

* Part 1: Make materialized views be uniform [e a v value_type_tag].

This looks ahead to a time when we could support arbitrary
user-defined materialized views.  For now, the "idents" materialized
view is those datoms of the form [e :db/ident :namespaced/keyword] and
the "schema" materialized view is those datoms of the form [e a v]
where a is in a particular set of attributes that will become clear in
the following commits.

This change is not backwards compatible, so I'm removing the open
current (really, v2) test.  It'll be re-instated when we get to
https://github.com/mozilla/mentat/issues/194.

* Pre: Map TypedValue::Ref to TypedValue::Keyword in debug output.

* Part 3: Separate `schema_to_mutate` from the `schema` used to interpret.

This is just to keep track of the expected changes during
bootstrapping.  I want bootstrap metadata mutations to flow through
the same code path as metadata mutations during regular transactions;
by differentiating the schema used for interpretation from the schema
that will be updated I expect to be able to apply bootstrap metadata
mutations to an empty schema and have things like materialized views
created (using the regular code paths).

This commit has been re-ordered for conceptual clarity, but it won't
compile because it references the metadata module.  It's possible to
make it compile -- the functionality is there in the schema module --
but it's not worth the rebasing effort until after review (and
possibly not even then, since we'll squash down to a single commit to
land).

* Part 2: Maintain entids separately from idents.

In order to support historical idents, we need to distinguish the
"current" map from entid -> ident from the "complete historical" map
ident -> entid.  This is what Datomic does; in Datomic, an ident is
never retracted (although it can be replaced).  This approach is an
important part of allowing multiple consumers to share a schema
fragment as it migrates forward.

This fixes a limitation of the Clojure implementation, which did not
handle historical idents across knowledge base close and re-open.

The "entids" materialized view is naturally a slice of the "datoms"
table.  The "idents" materialized view is a slice of the
"transactions" table.  I hope that representing in this way, and
casting the problem in this light, might generalize to future
materialized views.

* Pre: Add DiffSet.

* Part 4: Collect mutations to a `Schema`.

I haven't taken your review comment about consuming AttributeBuilder
during each fluent function.  If you read my response and still want
this, I'm happy to do it in review.

* Part 5: Handle :db/ident and :db.{install,alter}/attribute.

This "loops" the committed datoms out of the SQL store and back
through the metadata (schema, but in future also partition map)
processor.  The metadata processor updates the schema and produces a
report of what changed; that report is then used to update the SQL
store.  That update includes:
- the materialized views ("entids", "idents", and "schema");
- if needed, a subset of the datoms themselves (as flags change).

I've left a TODO for handling attribute retraction in the cases that
it makes sense.  I expect that to be straight-forward.

* Review comment: Rename DiffSet to AddRetractAlterSet.

Also adds a little more commentary and a simple test.

* Review comment: Use ToIdent trait.

* Review comment: partially revert "Part 2: Maintain entids separately from idents."

This reverts commit 23a91df9c35e14398f2ddbd1ba25315821e67401.

Following our discussion, this removes the "entids" materialized
view.  The next commit will remove historical idents from the "idents"
materialized view.

* Post: Use custom Either rather than std::result::Result.

This is not necessary, but it was suggested that we might be paying an
overhead creating Err instances while using error_chain.  That seems
not to be the case, but this change shows that we don't actually use
any of the Result helper methods, so there's no reason to overload
Result.  This change might avoid some future confusion, so I'm going
to land it anyway.

Signed-off-by: Nick Alexander <nalexander@mozilla.com>

* Review comment: Don't preserve historical idents.

* Review comment: More prepared statements when updating materialized views.

* Post: Test altering :db/cardinality and :db/unique.

These tests fail due to a Datomic limitation, namely that the marker
flag :db.alter/attribute can only be asserted once for an attribute!
That is, [:db.part/db :db.alter/attribute :attribute] will only be
transacted at most once.  Since older versions of Datomic required the
:db.alter/attribute flag, I can only imagine they either never wrote
:db.alter/attribute to the store, or they handled it specially.  I'll
need to remove the marker flag system from Mentat in order to address
this fundamental limitation.

* Post: Remove some more single quotes from error output.

* Post: Add assert_transact! macro to unwrap safely.

I was finding it very difficult to track unwrapping errors while
making changes, due to an underlying Mac OS X symbolication issue that
makes running tests with RUST_BACKTRACE=1 so slow that they all time
out.

* Post: Don't expect or recognize :db.{install,alter}/attribute.

I had this all working... except we will never see a repeated
`[:db.part/db :db.alter/attribute :attribute]` assertion in the store!
That means my approach would let you alter an attribute at most one
time.  It's not worth hacking around this; it's better to just stop
expecting (and recognizing) the marker flags.  (We have all the data
to distinguish the various cases that we need without the marker
flags.)

This brings Mentat in line with the thrust of newer Datomic versions,
but isn't compatible with Datomic, because (if I understand correctly)
Datomic automatically adds :db.{install,alter}/attribute assertions to
transactions.

I haven't purged the corresponding :db/ident and schema fragments just
yet:
- we might want them back
- we might want them in order to upgrade v1 and v2 databases to the
  new on-disk layout we're fleshing out (v3?).

* Post: Don't make :db/unique :db.unique/* imply :db/index true.

This patch avoids a potential bug with the "schema" materialized view.
If :db/unique :db.unique/value implies :db/index true, then what
happens when you _retract_ :db.unique/value?  I think Datomic defines
this in some way, but I really want the "schema" materialized view to
be a slice of "datoms" and not have these sort of ambiguities and
persistent effects.  Therefore, to ensure that we don't retract a
schema characteristic and accidentally change more than we intended
to, this patch stops having any schema characteristic imply any other
schema characteristic(s).  To achieve that, I added an
Option<Unique::{Value,Identity}> type to Attribute; this helps with
this patch, and also looks ahead to when we allow to retract
:db/unique attributes.

* Post: Allow to retract :db/ident.

* Post: Include more details about invalid schema changes.

The tests use strings, so they hide the chained errors which do in
fact provide more detail.

* Review comment: Fix outdated comment.

* Review comment: s/_SET/_SQL_LIST/.

* Review comment: Use a sub-select for checking cardinality.

This might be faster in practice.

* Review comment: Put `attribute::Unique` into its own namespace.
2017-03-20 13:18:59 -07:00
..
intern_set.rs Implement upsert resolution algorithm. (#186, #283). r=rnewman, f=jsantell 2017-02-14 16:50:40 -08:00
lib.rs Schema alteration. Fixes #294 and #295. (#370) r=rnewman 2017-03-20 13:18:59 -07:00