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KeyValue With Key

Overview

Usually, developers of a KeyValue store tends to use keys with some complex structure.

In Valentina DB, we allow defining such structure explicitly. There are few reasons to use this approach:

  • engine is able to build comparator for such keys.
  • engine can do more operations, such as: GET LIKE, DELETE LIKE.
Notice that KeyValue WithKey EXTENDs Default KeyValue, i.e. all operations of Default KeyValue are available.

Key Structure

Key Structure specification is just a list of allowed TYPEs.

Allowed types are:

  • BOOLEAN, BYTE, USHORT, SHORT, ULONG, LONG, ULLONG, LLONG
  • VARCHAR
  • VARBINARY

Example:

// 3-part keyStructure specification for keys like
// "1.1.John", "1.2.Smith" ...
String keyStructure( "ULONG, ULONG, VARCHAR" );

You can specify Key Structure string in

You cannot change KeyStructure later. The only way it to copy keyValue pairs into new KeyValue.

DELETE/GET LIKE

Imagine that you have keys of structure “ULONG, ULONG, STRING”:

1.1.birth_date
1.1.first_name
1.1.last_name
1.2.birth_date
1.2.first_name
1.2.last_name
2.6.width
2.7.width

You can see that keys will be sorted into groups. Using the first parts of a key we are able to select group of records.

Example:

KEYVALUE kv1 GET LIKE '1.1'

Results in records:

  1.1.birth_date
  1.1.first_name
  1.1.last_name

Example:

KEYVALUE kv1 GET LIKE '1'

Results in records:

  1.1.birth_date
  1.1.first_name
  1.1.last_name
  1.2.birth_date
  1.2.first_name
  1.2.last_name

Note that:

  • Although we are using keyword LIKE, in fact, we are doing “START WITH” search.
  • We mention only one or few key parts.
  • You cannot do GET LIKE '' to select all pairs because this can be a huge number of records in general case. {Good/Bad ?}
  • Currently, the LIKE commands work only in SQL. Because in v7.0 we have no way to return a group of records via API.

Key Delimiter

Since the key is a complex value, we use Value_Compound class to operate with such key. But also we need a string representation for such key. It is just a string contained sub-keys separated by some symbol - “Key Delimiter”. Default delimiter symbol is '.' (DOT).

You can change it runtime using:

  • API: VDatabase.KeyDelimiter property.
  • SQL: SET PROPERTY delimiter OF KEYVALUE kv_name TO '|'