Derivatives of Core::Object should be constructed through
ClassName::construct(), to avoid handling ref-counted objects with
refcount zero. Fixing the visibility means that misuses like this are
more difficult.
Classes reading and writing to the data heap would communicate directly
with the Heap object, and transfer ByteBuffers back and forth with it.
This makes things like caching and locking hard. Therefore all data
persistence activity will be funneled through a Serializer object which
in turn submits it to the Heap.
Introducing this unfortunately resulted in a huge amount of churn, in
which a number of smaller refactorings got caught up as well.
Unfortunately this patch is quite large.
The main functionality included are a BTree index implementation and
the Heap class which manages persistent storage.
Also included are a Key subclass of the Tuple class, which is a
specialization for index key tuples. This "dragged in" the Meta layer,
which has classes defining SQL objects like tables and indexes.
