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

[Seth Mattinen]

Robert Schetterer wrote:
> Timo Sirainen schrieb:
>> On Aug 11, 2009, at 12:41 AM, Seth Mattinen wrote:
>>
>>>> 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.)
>>>>
>>>
>>> Why is a database a better choice than a clustered filesystem?
>> Show me a clustered filesystem that can guarantee that each file is
>> stored in at least 3 different data centers and can scale linearly by
>> simply adding more servers (let's say at least up to thousands).
>>
>> Clustered filesystems are also complex. They're much more complex than
>> what Dovecot really requires.
>>
> 
> i like the idea of sql based mail services
> whatever your  choice is, use of cluster file systems stays ever,
> but with databased setups it should much more easy to
> have redudant mailstores, i have all possible stuff quota, acl etc in a
> database yet, incl spamassassin, greylisting, webmail the only thing
> which is left ,is the mail store, it would be great if there would be
> the possibility to have that, if there are no big disadvantages
> like poor performance etc with it
> 
> there is http://www.dbmail.org/
> has sombody ever used it ?
> so it can be compared


It wouldn't be an SQL database - it's not really suitable for this kind
of thing at the scale Timo is proposing.

~Seth