What is the Beta Release?

The Beta release of the Shore software is a release of work-in-progress. We will only be supporting a small number of beta-test sites. The release is targeted for sites that will use Shore as a system for writing applications using the Shore Data-definition Language and for those who want to write their own servers using the Shore Storage Manager. This document describes the release and provides pointers to other documents explaining how to install and use the software.

If you have questions, comments or bug reports, please mail them to

    shore_support@cs.wisc.edu

For information on other mailing lists, see the Shore WWW home page: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/shore/.

Requirements

The Beta release of Shore is supported for Sparcstations running SunOS and Solaris.

It has been ported to the following architectures:

• Linux 1.2.1,
• HP-UX,
• The Storage Manager and lower layers have also been ported to Irix.

You will also need the GNU C/C++ compiler, gcc, version 2.6.[23]. Complete details about required software and hardware are available in the Requirements section of the Installation manual.

Copyright and Disclaimer

The Shore software is distributed with the following copyright notice and disclaimer, and is subject to its terms:

Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison. All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its documentation is hereby granted, provided that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of the software, derivative works or modified versions, and any portions thereof, and that both notices appear in supporting documentation.

THE COMPUTER SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN -- MADISON ALLOWS FREE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IN ITS "AS IS" CONDITION. THE DEPARTMENT DISCLAIMS ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

The Shore Project Group requests users of this software to return any improvements or extensions that they make to the Shore Project Group, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, 1210 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706-1685.

In addition, the Shore Project Group requests that users grant the Computer Sciences Department rights to redistribute these changes.

What is New in the Release

All reported bugs in Alpha have been fixed. The bugs that were identified in the Alpha release documents have been fixed.

General

• Ported to Solaris, HP-UX, Linux.

• Now compiles with gcc 2.7.0. However, due to bugs in the code generated by gcc, the system will not run. Hopefully, it will work with gcc 2.7.1.

• All layers use a common statistics mechanism so that stats can be gathered and printed at any layer, for all lower layers ( statistics(FC), statistics(OC), statistics(SVAS), statistics(SSM) ).

• The documentation includes a list of all the manual pages ( contents, ).

Applications

• We have made substantial improvements in the C++ language binding generated by SDL, and we have included manual pages for the C++ language bindings for various SDL features.

• The SDL compiler now writes and checks version numbers in the metatypes database. If a new release of SDL is incompatible with data created under an old release, the compiler will now inform you of that fact.

• Options-processing functions now read the command-line, and treat -h, -v specially (options(COMMON)).

• Support in SDL for importing/exporting modules.

• Unions are supported.

• The index-attribute methods return "shrc" error codes.

• The SDL compiler and C++-language-binding generator are bundled into one executable, which command-line options (sdl(SDL)).

• The example program stree uses indexes.

• All the error codes that can be returned to an application are documented (errors(OC)).

• Non-critical errors can occur without causing the transaction to abort.

• The class Shore supports more Unix-like functions: ( access(OC), mkdir(OC), chdir(OC), chmod(OC), chown(OC), readlink(OC), rename(OC), rmdir(OC), pool(OC), stat(OC), symlink(OC), umask(OC), unlink(OC), utimes(OC) ).

Object cache

• The object cache now replaces objects. Options control the size of the object cache (options(OC)).

• Anonymous objects can be created with uninitialized data (the object cache does this).

• The object cache and the server cooperate to batch requests, but there is still no parallelism in the protocol.

• The object cache has partial support for inter-transaction caching of objects: a transaction is committed and a new transaction is begun, and the new transaction inherits the locks of the old transaction (transaction(OC)).

• The object cache and language binding maintain reference counts in modules. Instances of objects are counted, so that a module cannot be deleted unless there are no instances of objects of any of the types in the module. This can be turned off with a run-time option. (options(OC)).

Shore server

• Support for persistent links between volumes (persistent mount) with the Shore server.

  The original Beta distribution could not support running a server in the background, without a Tcl shell, with more than one volume mounted. This distribution allows such a configuration. An option, svas_serve was added to allow volumes other than the root volume to be ``served'' as soon as the server starts up. This configuration option obviates the need for a Tcl shell in order to so instruct the server.

• New options control logging levels. (options(SVAS)).

• The default configuration files have changed to reflect the changes in option names and new options.

• There are now commands to serve devices and to list the served devices (use on-line help for this).

• Suppression of error messages is changed (use on-line help).

• The server rolls back to a savepoint rather than aborting the transaction when an error occurs.

• You can now shut the server down from inside the start-up script.

• Directories are now implemented as indexes. (Performance of directory operations is no longer linear in the size of the directory.) Degree 2 transaction semantics is now the default for directory operations.

• The format of volumes has changed; data created under the Alpha release cannot be read by a Beta server.

• A pool can no longer be removed unless it is empty. The server's Tcl shell allows you to scan a pool and remove the objects in the pool with "scanpool <path> remove".

Storage manager

• Ported to SGI Irix.

• More complete manual pages.

• Documentation for writing value-added servers.

• The SM uses Unix fstat (instead of path names) to identify volumes internally, so that you cannot mistakenly use one volume with two paths.