Hi Josh, I see your point. I was thinking about an architecture like YouTube where each video is stored on one of the numerous servers they have (not in a DB). When you delete a mail, the application could delete the file on the SAN and send the SQL query to the DB. If anything goes wrong (ie: data loss, data corruption...), you can restore the latest backup. What do you think? By the way, do you think storing the attachments in the database make it less fast? Cheers,
Charles. On 12/6/07, Josh Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Charles, > > I work for a small ISP and we are using DBMail for all our users. We > have two locations (one in Holland, the other in Australia) and the > database is around 40Gb each, for around 5000 users. > > To make sure that it keeps running we use MySQL with heartbeat storing > its data on a DRBD device. We have a secondary MySQL server that's sole > purpose is to take daily backups from. > > We have three mail servers which accept mail via postfix, scan for > viruses with clamsmtpd and classify for spam with dspam. These mail > servers only communicate between each other using the database. If the > attachments for the emails were stored on a filesystem (which really is > just another database) then we would have to use nfs or similar to share > between the mail servers. This adds an extra level of complexity. > Consider also if an email is deleted, it would also have to be deleted > from the filesystem. This is something you can't easily do with just SQL > commands. > > Also by using the database server logging, you can restore to any > point-in-time. No way you can do that with a filesystem-based mail > server. Best you can do is use filesystem snapshots, which in my > experience has been unreliable. > > Regards, > Josh. > > Charles A. Landemaine wrote: > > I found it strange to > > store attachments in the database. Wouldn't it be more efficient and > > lighter for the database engine to store a path to the attachment in > > the database and to store the actual file on the file system? One > > could imagine storing a reference to the file this way: > > > > attachments/2007/12/06/annual_report.pdf > > > > _______________________________________________ > DBmail mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail > -- Charles A. Landemaine. _______________________________________________ DBmail mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail
