Hi, this is great! In iroh we have to return owned iterators to tables, and thus far resorted to the ouroboros crate, which allows to create self-referential structs through very unsafe means. We'd love to get rid of that, because ouroboros was plagued with unsoundness issues in the past.

However one of our owned iterators contains a Range to table B, but returns values from ReadOnlyTable A (table B is an index table, and table A contains the actual values). To remove the need for ouroboros here, redb would have to provide an ArcReadOnlyTable in addition to the ArcRange I think. From reading the code, this seems feasable to add, in the same way as the ArcRange works. What do you think?

I think I'll be able to just remove all the lifetimes from ReadOnlyTable. I haven't gotten to prototyping it yet, but one of my goals for 2.0 is to only have lifetimes on objects used for writing

I've seen more crates have functions and structs use the owned or Owned prefix/suffix. Maybe there's a future where there's no Arc usage in there and suddenly the naming makes less sense when using that as a prefix :)

one of my goals for 2.0 is to only have lifetimes on objects used for writing

Is there a limitation requiring a lifetime for writes? I assume that means WriteTransaction and Table would still require a lifetime bound.

My current experiment is making a DBMS backed by redb, using rhai as its "query language". rhai requires static lifetimes for custom types. My temporary solution is to use a once_cell::sync::Lazy to get a 'static redb database. I do have to open tables very often because they also have lifetimes. I can't keep them around as custom objects passed via rhai. Anyway, all this to say that "owned" types would help a lot for these kinds of things!

Is there a limitation requiring a lifetime for writes? I assume that means WriteTransaction and Table would still require a lifetime bound.

I think the lifetime can be removed from WriteTransaction, and maybe Table too. The Range returned from Table has to have a lifetime though, because it effectively borrows from Table which is mutable

@Frando I think the latest master will allow you remove that. read-only tables are now returned with the 'static lifetime

@cberner I'm struggling to create an owned Iterator for a range. Do you have an example somewhere? I was on the latest release from crates.io, with the git version it all works

Great! Ya, it's not released yet because I want to get a couple more breaking changes in before I release 2.0