A server that purports to be a repository of information isn’t much good if the server can’t survive a reboot. So clearly now that NetAuth has some data worth storing, it should be stored somewhere.
Databases are usually implemented as a service that is connected to via the network, and for good reason. Taking MySQL for example, the server needs to have some means to manage multiple tables of information, to handle changes to rules surrounding this information, to authenticate and authorize readers and writers and more. It is no wonder than that MySQL does this as a separate binary and that Database Administration is a respected profession.
One of the biggest frustrations though for me as a systems engineer is when something needs some external dependency when it really shouldn’t. Databases are a good example of this. They’re a fine thing and solve many problems that would otherwise have to be implemented in a local system, but they’re also extra overhead to run and almost universally a pain to install, manage, and upgrade. Some of the best applications I know provide database plugins which allow you to use one of many different options, and usually SQLite is one of these options. Its a single-file SQL database written in C and it works quite well. This though assumes that we’re in C when we aren’t.
The plugin thing is a good idea though, so we’ll use that and just build a plugin that works for now, and if we need higher performance then that’s just another plugin down the road.
So what is the database doing? What do we need it to do? Well, it needs to be able to store entities and groups. This is effectively two seperate tables. For simplicity we don’t really need or want the fancy SQL rules for deletes or other expansions involving the keyword CASCADE. Really we just want something that allows us to send it objects and get them back later. A cache would also be nice. Oh, and since this is an authentication system the data we send should be stored securely and only visible to the NetAuth server itself (and a backup process, but we’ll ignore that for now). Ideally this storage platform should also have checksums that allow you to recover data in the event of corruption like an unclean shutdown.
This really sounds like a filesystem.
Since all the data that’s in use in NetAuth is just protobuf, why not just write the protobufs to the disk? This is a straightforward solution that should work fairly well, it will permit quick and easy operation out of the box and if needed data could always be migrated later to a more capable storage system.
Thus NetAuth shall have a default storage engine that just writes the protos to disk. This engine is called ProtoDB, and with a reasonably fast disk, or an SSD, is probably very usable in installations with a modest modification rate.
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