BYODS is an extension of Ascent that allows custom data structures backing relations. The OOPSLA paper Bring Your Own Data Structures to Datalog describes the semantics and high-level design of BYODS, and presents a number of experiments demonstrating the capabilities of BYODS.
With BYODS, any relation in an Ascent program can be tagged with a data structure provider:
ascent! {
#[ds(ascent_byods_rels::eqrel)]
relation rel(u32, u32);
// ...
}
In the above example, relation rel
is backed by the eqrel
data structure provider, which makes rel
an equivalence relation.
In the above example, ascent_byods_rels::eqrel
is the path of the module containing the macros required of a data structure provider. You can define your own data structure providers. To see what macros are required of a data structure provider, see ascent::rel
, which is the default data structure provider.
The most important macros of a data structure privider are rel_ind
and rel_ind_common
.
Macro invocations for rel_ind_common
and other macros look like this:
my_provider::rel_ind_common!(
rel, // rel name
(u32, u32), // column types
[[1]], // logical indices
ser, // parallel (par) or serial (ser)
(), // user-specified params
)
These macro invocations evaluate to types that implement certain traits. rel_ind!
returned types must implement ToRelIndex
. This trait provides an indirection, allowing relation indices to share data (the type returned by rel_ind_common!
). The type returned by the to_rel_index
function of this trait is used to read the relation data, and must implement RelIndexRead
and RelIndexReadAll
traits. The type returned by to_rel_index_write
is used to write new values to an index, and must implement RelIndexWrite
and RelIndexMerge
.
These traits have Key
and Value
associated types. Key
is the tuple of the indexed-on columns, and Value
is the tuple of the remaining columns. For example, for an index [1, 2] of a relation relation rel(Col0, Col1, Col2)
, the Key
type would be (Col1, Col2)
and the Value
type would be (Col0,)
. For RelIndexReadAll
, the Key
and Value
types are references to tuples, or tuples of references (see TupleOfBorrowed
). The same is true for the Value
type of RelIndexRead
.
rel_ind_common!
provides sharing of data between indices of a relation. Types returned by this macro invocation only need to implement RelIndexMerge
.
To support parallel Ascent, relation indices need to implement parallel versions of the above traits. For example, CRelIndexRead
, CRelIndexReadAll
, and CRelIndexWrite
.
TODO: finish the guide