On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 09:25:53PM +0100, Brad Knowles wrote: > > Assuming I had a clean slate to start a database project for a mail > > store, personally I'd much rather prototype it in something like > > postgresql where I could add data types to deal with email. I could > > then make header types, text types, mime types classes, etc. Then I > > could test to see if it was a good idea to implement it. > > IMO, that would be an exercise in futility. We've been down this > road a million times before. We don't need to go down it again to > know that the result is not likely to be successful, especially when > we have alternatives that are proven to work well -- we store the > message meta-data in the database, and then the message bodies in an > separate message store akin to INN timecaf/timehash "heaps" (see > <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/lisa2000/sld090.htm>).
It seems like you're only partially agreeing/disagreeing with me (optimist/pessamist). Disagreeing: you're saying that using datatypes in the database which are appropriate to the kind of data being stored (mail messages) is an excercise in futility. But, agreeing: that storing these in a database in another way is OK. I don't get why you'd just want to store these as text when you have databases that can be made more suitable to the problem. > > I think using a standard sql database for doing mail operations is > > asking for trouble. Standard databases don't know how to parse > > rfc822/2822 headers and that means that you've got to either write a > > whole lot of stored procedures in a clunky query language (or > > java!?!?!) and then maintain it, or you've got to do it all in the > > imap/pop3/whatever server which means a whole lot of yammering traffic > > between the database and the I/P/W server all the time, which == slow. > > You don't ask the database to understand or parse RFC2822 headers > or messages. That's up to your application. You just store data > using the formats known to the database, and the message bodies > according to the methods above. So all the parsing happens in the database client side. Which is slow. -Peter -- The 5 year plan: In five years we'll make up another plan. Or just re-use this one. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
