On Thu, May 31, 2007, Charles Marcus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: >>> What about breaking the message up into its constituent parts >>> (headers, body, attachments, etc), so that single-instance storage can >>> be achieved? > >> I have sometimes wondered about storing (large? say > n mbytes) >> attachments as files outside the DB. Generally I assume most of the size >> of a db comes from these attachments and you can't search them anyway >> (most are probably jpegs/mpeg etc) so keeping them in the DB seems less >> useful. > > Actually, the major benefit was in the first sentence of my comment - > *single*-*instance*-*storage*. > > By storing the constituent parts of a message in a DB, and MD5-summing > them (or whatever algorithm floats your boat), you can very easily allow > for single-instance-storage, so that if someone completely different > sends or receives a message with funny_picture.jpg (25MB) as an > attachment, and this file already exists in the message store, it is > simply linked to, not stored... > > This capability alone would probably reduce my mailstore by 80+%.
It's on the feature wishlist, but I don't think we can do it this year. It really comes down to how long we want to be in development on the next release. Clustering, better scalability, and some key new IMAP features are probably more important goals, and we can do a stable release on mostly the same database schema as we have now. If we try to do all that and rip up the database schema all at once, we'll certainly be in dev until late 2008. Many of the proposed features are good targets for sponsored development. If there's code that you really want moved to the front of the priority list, sponsoring its development can do that! Aaron _______________________________________________ DBmail mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail
