On 8.2.2011, at 14.22, Marten Lehmann wrote:
I found a posting on the mailing list from 2008 "Adding new storage backend to Dovecot" while searching for POP3 and IMAP servers, that allow to use a NoSQL backend rather than a traditional file system.
I don't remember any mails about NoSQL backend from 2008, but at the end of 2009 it became something I started planning on doing. It's listed in http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Roadmap
Isn't this option of big interest for every bigger mailbox provider? How hard would it be to develop? Would it be possible to get this developed on a paid basis by the dovecot core team?
It should be pretty easy to develop if you don't care about performance, but since you likely do, it gets more difficult. The latencies for db lookups are higher than local reads, so it would be good to be able to do multiple lookups in parallel. I've recently started imapc backend, which has similar problems and I was planning on solving those problems with it, so it will be easier then for nosql backend. Also it would be good to design a storage backend for nosql that didn't require any kind of locking.
One guy recently started looking into developing something for this, but I haven't heard from him for some weeks. I could ask if he's gotten anywhere.. As for me, I'm not entirely sure about my plans for this spring. There's another company wanting to pay me, but I don't know how much of my time they'll really need.