Mnesia: A Distributed DBMS Rooted in Concurrency

"Mnesia is a complete database management system (DBMS) included in Erlang OTP, an open source development environment for concurrent programming based on the Erlang language. As Mnesia is a true DBMS, distributing, replicating and fragmenting your data with it—even among thousands of nodes around the world—is child's play. You only need to run different Erlang nodes where you want to distribute the Mnesia database.

"The story of how Mnesia got its name is probably apocryphal, but legend has it that the original name was Amnesia until an Ericsson executive declared that a database couldn't be called something associated with forgetting. So, the engineers dropped the "A" and built Mnesia, something that remembers all. Mnesia offers the fault tolerance feature of any program implemented in Erlang, and you can interact with the database in Erlang itself. With Mnesia, Erlang becomes a database language.

"In this article, I highlight some of Mnesia's important features. The file test.erl provided in the source code download contains some simple functions that group together a few lines of code. It mainly uses an Erlang shell."

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