[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:59:06 -0800 
Peter C Norton <spacey-mailman at lenin.nu> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 10:14:52PM +0100, Brad Knowles wrote:

>> I don't believe that there are any databases in existence that
>> "... can be made more suitable to the problem."

> In theory you can add data types to postgresql.  Not that I've done it
> myself, but its been done.

True, but that doesn't answer the question of whether an RDBMS is a good
storage tool for messages.  I spent a couple months of spare time last
year building an archiving system I liked atop PostgresQL using fully
decomposed SQL structures for all the message bits.  It was not a pretty
exercise, and the results were worse.  Brad makes excellent points in
his comments on poor BLOB support, the value if DBs for meta-data, and
disaster recovery ease.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.