.emacs.d VS Udb

I've been using org mode to maintain a personal work log for around ten years.

General structure is a file per month, a toplevel outline heading per day, and a global hotkey that takes me to 'today' with a single button. I use a private git repository to archive it to a secure place and replicate across different machines if needed. (Not common.)

Code here:

https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d/blob/master/lisp/orglog....

It's worked well, but generally speaking the key to logging is less the code/system and much more the discipline to write every day. I'm hit or miss on that front, but still find it useful to both formalize my thoughts on things into english and also occasionally go back to look at previous things I've done. (Oh, and it makes developing lists of accomplishments for annual reviews an easy thing.)

This article is from 2021.

They indeed use an SQL database and SQL queries to implement a key-value store. The data is stored in a regular table (CREATE TABLE example (key BLOB PRIMARY KEY, value BLOB NOT NULL). It's very unlikely that this really achieves high-performance, given that the SQLite backend is actually a key-value store and the SQL interpreter runs on top of it as an intermediate layer. To avoid some performance-drawbacks caused by this architecture they added caching.

They have even considered RocksDB and LMDB, but have rejected them with reasons that I can not relate.

I have implemented a transactional key-value store myself for my project and information management tools fifteen years ago (before the other mentioned stores became available) based on the aforementioned SQLite backend (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Udb and https://github.com/rochus-keller/Sdb) which supports both robust integrity and high performance. Doing the same with the full SQLite just adds complexity and lowers performance with no added value.

I implemented my own NoSql database for Crossline which supports an efficient storage and traversal of outline items (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Udb). Even if there was a dedicated API in Emacs/Org-mode it's still file based text buffer interpretation and management behind the scenes.

SQLite has a backend which is well suited as a key-value store.

Here is a NoSql database based on the SQLite backend: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Udb.

I use it in many of my apps, e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine