[Dovecot] Scalability plans: Abstract out filesystem and make it someone else's problem

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 14:33 -0700, Seth Mattinen wrote:
> Timo Sirainen wrote:
> > This is something I figured out a few months ago, mainly because this
> > one guy at work (hi, Stu) kept telling me my multi-master replication
> > plan sucked and we should use some existing scalable database. (I guess
> > it didn't go exactly like that, but that's the result anyway.)
> > 
> 
> Ick, some people (myself included) hate the idea of storing mail in a 
> database versus simple and almost impossible to screw up plain text 
> files of maildir. 

Nothing forces you to switch from maildir, if you're happy with it :)
But if you want to support millions of users, it's simpler to distribute
the storage and disk I/O evenly across hundreds of servers using a
database that was designed for it. And by databases I mean here some of
those key/value-like databases, not SQL. (What's a good collective name
for those dbs anyway? BASE and NoSQL are a couple names I've seen.)

> Cyrus already does the whole mail-in-database thing.

No, Cyrus's mail database is very similar to how Dovecot works. Both
have somewhat similar index files, both store one mail/file (with
dbox/maildir). But Cyrus then also has some additional databases that
screw up things..
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