Store Chats in MVStore

Context and Problem Statement

This is a follow-up to ADR-032.

The chats with AI should be saved on exit from JabRef and retrieved on launch. We need to decide the format of the serialized messages.

Decision Drivers

• Easy to implement and maintain
• Memory-efficient (because JabRef is said to consume much memory)

Considered Options

• JSON
• MVStore
• Custom format

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: “MVStore”, because it is simple and memory-efficient.

Pros and Cons of the Options

JSON

• Good, because allows for easy storing and loading of chats
• Good, because cross-platform
• Good, because widely used and accepted, so there are lots of libraries for JSON format
• Good, because it is even possible to reuse the chats file for other purposes
• Good, because has potential for being mergeable by external tooling
• Bad, because too verbose (meaning the file size could be much smaller)

MVStore

• Good, because automatic loading and saving to disk
• Good, because memory-efficient
• Bad, because does not support mutable values in maps.
• Bad, because the order of messages need to be “hand-crafted” (e.g., by mapping from an Integer to the concrete message), since MVStore does not support storing list which update.
• Bad, because it stores data as key-values, but not as a custom data type (like tables in RDBMS)

Custom format

• Good, because we have the full control
• Bad, because involves writing our own language and parser
• Bad, because we need to implement optimizations found in databases on our own (storing some data in RAM, other on disk)

More information

For the same logic, the summaries are stored in MVStore.