History of the MemCP project

History of the MemCP project

MemCP grew from research into compressed in-memory data management and functional query execution. Its lineage includes work from the HAEC research environment and the Eris project at TU Dresden (2012–2016). The MemCP repository began on 24 December 2022, and the first successful SQL query followed in February 2023.

The project was written in Go around an embedded Scheme runtime that represents and compiles query plans as data. Early application use in 2024 drove broader SQL compatibility, persistence, and operational tooling. Subsequent work connected the original column-storage ideas with durable engines, adaptive physical structures, transaction infrastructure, and an increasingly explicit logical-to-physical planner architecture.

This page records major milestones rather than every merged change. Dates and technical claims should be backed by repository history, release notes, or contemporary project records; the changelog and pull requests remain authoritative for detailed chronology.

2026: first public release and current architecture

MemCP 0.1 was released in March 2026. During 2026 the project added ACID/OCC transaction infrastructure, enforced foreign keys, persistent triggers, adaptive memory management, S3 and Ceph backends, a native x86-64 JIT, SQL views, window functions, comprehensive subquery decorrelation, cost-based join ordering, RecSet scan sources, guarded plan specialization, a cost-based physical lowerer, and native BSON-backed MySQL/PostgreSQL JSON support.

The repository changelog and merged pull requests are authoritative for chronology. The current architecture is documented under Query Planner and Physical Lowering, Transactions and Isolation, Columnar Storage, and Current Status and Open Issues.