[Spambayes] Guidance re pickles versus DB for Outlook

[Skip Montanaro]

    SM> * Dealing with Zope's monolithic system is frustrating to people
    SM> (like me) who are used to having files reside in filesystems.  Some
    SM> of that frustration probably carries over to ZODB, though it's
    SM> almost certainly not ZODB's problem.

    Jeremy> This sounds like a Zope complaint ...

Like I said, for better or for worse, perceptions about Zope rub off on
ZODB. ;-)

    SM> * It seems to grow without bound, else why do I need to pack my
    SM> Data.fs file every now and then?

    Jeremy> It grows without bound unless you pack it.  Why is that a
    Jeremy> problem?  BerkeleyDB log files grow without bound, too.

Hmmm...  What log files?  If I do something like

    db = bsddb.hashopen("foo", "c")
    while 1:
        db["1"] = "1"*100000

the underlying file doesn't grow without bound.  (I let the above run just
now for about five minutes.  Final size after I unterrupted it and closed
the file was 114k.)  If db was a zodb file would that still be true?  I
thought all writes in ZODB (perhaps is this a property of FileStorage?) were
at the end of the file.  Space freed up isn't reused, hence the need for the
occasional pack, right?

Skip