Hi all,
Saturday morning, and here I am back at it, why do we do this? :-)
Referring in general to the overnight posts I will fill in a bit of detail
and hopefully answer a few things, from our perspective here at least.
You cannot store "everything" in an SQL text field. some chars are still
interpreted as operators even tho' they are in the middle of a bit of text,
its a real pain. Some examples:-
standard bit of SQL:
insert into Table
(textfield)
values ('this is a bit of text')
that works fine, this won't:
values ('this is a bit of text with a < in it')
This means you have to escape or encode everything you put in the field.
That means that searching on that field is made a lot harder unless you
make an encoding tag that leaves the spaces there so that it still makes
vague sense to the search indexing engine.
Regarding performance between a database or a file the answer would depend
on platforms and all sorts of things like mail server system size. A big,
busy mail server would very rapidly have a very large mail database which
would create a performance hit. A file-based system doesn't care how big
and busy things are, the overhead is the same all the time.
To give an idea, we run our production mail server on the same platform as
when we started testing the whole thing back at the end of last year, when
I was hassling Howie almost daily as we worked thru the "hidden code
curiosities" :-) That platform is a 120MHZ pentium box with CF4 on it, not
very powerful at all by modern standards, with an external database, on one
of our production DB servers. It pounds out somewhere between 10 to 30
thousand messages a day. When it is posting it runs flat out, 100% useage,
when you POP in to collect mail it spits things out as fast as the network
and the mail client can handle it. That is using a file-based message store.
We are about to move the server to a 700MHz Athlon box and we will leave
everything else the same and then we will do a fair bit of performance
comparison to see how things have changed.
Currently I feel a hybrid system is the way to go with message data in a
DB, messages themselves in files (overcoming database/ODBC limitations on
the way) with a search engine parsing those files with its results in a DB.
Now I must pop out and get some food. Its sometimes an advantage living
over the shop in the middle of a small shopping centre, I never have far to
go to stop myself from starving :-)
BTW, its 18C outside, (say 70F for you old imperial folk), sun blazing
down, more than just warm on the skin, blue sky, lovely weather. And its
winter :^)
--
Yours,
Kym
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