On 05/09/2011 01:38 AM, Chris Boulton wrote:
> Speaking from a purely "part"/blob view, there are better solutions than
> a database for storing such information. An RDBMS is great for 95% of
> what DBMail does, but mail parts could be stored better. Doing so allows
> you to scale different parts of your system - I can guarantee that it's
> going to be more difficult to scale databases with massive blobs as
> opposed to just simple sets of relational data.

I really don't want to go into any kind of debate about (no)sql. But I
guess there's really no way around it in the end. From my point of view;
I know rdbms has a poor rep with regards to scaling out on blob storage.
Indexing is non-standard (fti), storage is sometimes poorly optimized,
and yes: better solutions exist to both problems (solr/lucene type
engines for indexing, and document-stores such as mongodb and couchdb -
or even plain file-systems for scalable blobstores). But like Harry
correctly pointed out, these rdbms' weaknesses are actively being
addressed - and sometimes even overstated.

> 
> FYI for the OP, I'm looking at implementing mail part (so message
> content) storage in OpenStack's ObjectStore, and intend on having
> modular backends for storage. The first part of the puzzle though is
> dealing with message indexing - which needs to be offloaded to
> something/somewhere else. I'm half through writing up a proposal for the
> developers list on such an implementation.

Having a plug-able architecture for blob-storage is definitely a boon.
Whether that entails openstack/s3/nfs or whatever is less interesting.
The _hard_ part is defining a complete interface, and implementing that
interface in a correct manner.

Storage and indexing are absolutely orthogonal and should not be mixed
in any new implementations.

And to answer the OP: Other than Chris' initiative in OpenStack, I'm not
aware of anyone working on the storage drivers.

-- 
  ________________________________________________________________
  Paul J Stevens        pjstevns @ gmail, twitter, skype, linkedin
  NFG Net Facilities Group BV___________________________Utrecht_NL
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