I believe we've all gone over this before, but remember if you do something like this, you lose or complicate redundancy.
For example, our dbmail installation, which has over 4500 mailboxes and 100,000 emails/week has three mail servers and two database servers. The database servers are MySQL in a master-master replication setup, with one set as the active using ucarp (it's not smart to load balance database servers with dbmail). The three mail servers are load balanced with LVS on the firewalls. We have a backup database server that replicates off a particular master, which is stopped daily to take a snapshot, then restarted again. This takes backup load off the primary database server. If you store the messages outside the database and wanted redundancy then you would have to share them on a file server using something like NFS. This would add complexity, and I believe it would not increase speed or availability. A few other questions to ask yourself before doing such a thing include: * Will it change the amount of disk space required? (Not really) * What is your backup strategy? You may have to shut down the server to get a true snapshot. * What is your recovery strategy? Can you do a point-in-time recovery? (NO, files are created and deleted) Everything I see is that to pull the message contents out of the database and store in the filesystem: * Adds complexity to the creation and deletion of emails * Adds complexity to backup and restore * Adds complexity to a redundant system * Limits the system to snapshot recoveries only, which affect the operating speed of the mail system. * Has little to no increase in speed I'm not sure why you're wanting to store the messages on the filesystem instead of in the database. I have had our customers on a postix-courier setup using NFS as the backend. The dbmail solution has been much nicer to administer. It's especially nice that when an email is deleted, it's just an SQL and the email comes back (unless it's been purged by dbmail-util) Regards, Josh. > > i need to know if is possible to construct something like: > > > > DBmail stores Message and the attachments of messages are stored outside > > Mysql DB. > > > > Thanks. !!! _______________________________________________ DBmail mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.fastxs.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dbmail
