[Tutor] design advise

[davidwilson at Safe-mail.net]

Thanks for the reply, but reading from my initial post I don't seem to have made my question clear ;(

I was thinking more in terms of how python would find it more efficient in retrieving the information, this being:
1) Storing all the user files in one place and then selecting only the files with the correct permissions for the user views
 2) Storing the files in the user's folder and then building a list of this files on the main views, such as /news/index.html

I guess in the first instance the code will only has to traverse one directory and build the dictionary of all the files for that specific user when the user wants their files. i.e /users/user/news/list_of_news_items.html

Whereas on the second method the code will have to travererse each user's directory and build a dictionary for all the published documents to display for the main view i.e /news/index.html

The thing that bothers me is that I ma have 10 users or 100,000 users and really wanted to get an opinion as to which option would scale better, leaving aside the relational DB approach.

Dave

-------- Original Message --------
From: Kent Johnson <kent37 at tds.net>
Apparently from: kent3737 at gmail.com
To: davidwilson at safe-mail.net
Cc: tutor at python.org
Subject: Re: [Tutor] design advise
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:41:54 -0400

> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 7:52 AM, <davidwilson at safe-mail.net> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I would like advise on what method would be better in terms of search and retrieval.
> >
> > In my application I need to choose how to store data for each user, for example:
> >
> > /news
> > /articles
> > /games
> >
> > My difficulty now comes in how to store this data in that I will need to create views of the data depending on where in the directory the viewer is at for example file:///news/ should contain all the news submitted by all users and file:///games/ should contain all games ...
> >
> > Also in the file:///users/user/ the user will need access only to their own items, so for example, file:///users/user_1/news/ will list all news added by user_1 etc...
> >
> > Which is the more efficient option for storing this data, is it better to have all in one place and for each users'
> >  view to search by user id and return the filtered down list, or store it within each users' individual directory and then create a new list by traversing each users' directory?
> 
> Maybe you should consider storing the data in a database instead of in
> the file system? Then it would be easy to retrieve all news, or just
> the news for a single user.
> 
> Kent