We've been looking at some updates to a few of the persistent structures in PDS, and we were wondering if anyone current requires serialization compatibility between releases.  The issue is that if people are using PDS for persistence, then these new changes would cause currently stored objects to be incompatible with the new serialized forms of the objects.  We could provide tools for crawling the data store and updating, but we're  wondering if this is currently needed by the community.

Are people using PDS for persistence, or is the database restarted clean with each run?  If not, do people have expectations on when they might start using it for persistence, or could people comment on why they are not?  Any feedback would be very useful for how we plan future updates like this.

There are few things that are clear for me:

* The "currently" in the title. Is this means that only the next version may have incompatibility with the previous versions or you mean that future versions also may not be compatible with previous version("do people have expectations on when they might start using it for persistence" - this quote sounds more long therm)

* "using PDS for persistence" - could you explain a little more. As far I understood in pds almost everything is persistent - including tasks and ManagedObject . If I clear the data store you'll loose all the tasks, right? On other hand seems that if I don't clear it I can't run it because it's not compatible or I haven't understood it right?

Also I'm glad you asked this question because it reminds me two other question I have in mind for quite a long time but I always forgot to ask.

I'm not sure what word to use for the first one(English is not my strong side) - but I think "plans" is ok so... What your plans for the pds compatibility between the different versions? Will there be a version that require to clean the datastore or this will be rare cases and only between major releases?

And the second is a bit offtopic but: Is pds data store suitable to store some players profile information - in my case ratings? I just wonder where to store the ratings(and maybe recent matches(low number last 10 for example)) on the java EE server or in pds. In my code the difference between the two is only several lines of code so I suppose I'll try with both. So back on topic: I'm very tempted to store this profile information on pds. So it really will be nice if you explain a bit more these incompatibility issues and about the tools that will solve them. Especially if you plan to make more versions that are not compatible with the previous such information will help a lot in making the proper application design.

Well myself don't mind, because I thought this was going to happen anyway.
I'm all for ignoring this for now so other areas can be finished first.