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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