[Dovecot] Using MySQL to store email? - getting off topic

[Geo Carncross]

On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 17:29 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
>> Using a "big ol' SQL database" will ALWAYS give _worse performance_
>> than a specialized solution (like dbox), and will usually give _worse
> > performance_ than a naive but still specialized solution (like maildir
> > or mbox).
> >   
> Not true for "always".

Yes true for always.

It might be easier for your to accept if you read that as "a specialized
database can always perform better than a generic one" and you'll
probably understand better.

> If you have 100,000 messages in a folder the database will win easy.

The argument is not against databases, it's against SQL. dbox is a
database. maildir is a database.

> Les Mikesell wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 16:40 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote: 
> >   
> > On what operations?  Suppose you want to delete a message out of the
> > middle and release the file space back to the OS?  That's pretty
> > quick in a filesystem like Reiserfs.
> >   
> Suppose I want to move all message from a specific host to another folder.
> UPDATE table SET folder=new-folder WHERE host=value;

Since we're being completely hypothetical here:

echo new-folder > ~/hostmap/value.tmp && \
mv ~/hostmap/value.tmp ~/hostmap/value


> With databases you can do things you would have to write complex 
> programs to do with files.

Change that to SQL, and I agreed: Read my email again. See the part
about mutability? SQL is good for that.

> Things that you would consider to be impossible are trivial with databases.

No. Things that YOU would consider to be impossible, perhaps. But note
here that SQL != database. dbox is a kind of database- one that's
designed to specialize in email storage.

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