Storing Personal Information Management data: Akonadi - unifying PIM data for KDE

Storing Personal Information Management (PIM) data is not trivial, because of the variety in content types. Existing PIM storage systems have shortcomings in performance, data concistency and/or concurrency. In this thesis, we propose several optimisations and test them in Akonadi, KDE’s new central PIM data access manager. The optimisations include using the D-Bus protocol for transmitting short commands and notifications and an IMAP-compatible protocol for data access and modification. The PIM data is kept in its native format, but compressed and split up into separate, frequently-used parts for increased performance. Both the synthetic and use case based evaluation results show that the proposed modifications perform well and help maintain data consistency in Akonadi.