Well, that certainly answered the question! Thank you! BenO At 09:12 PM 7/2/02 -0500, you wrote: >On July 2, 2002 at 09:10, Ben Ocean wrote: > > > >I do not know if LDAP would be efficient for this. If you want > > >to do fulltext searching, I would not recommend LDAP. What kind > > >of searching would you like to do? > > > > I presume it's called full text searching. The *standard* kind of > searching > > one does on any search for discussion lists such as for python.org, > > zope.org, etc. > >I wanted to be sure since some types of searching could be appropriate >for LDAP. For example, you could store mail header information in >LDAP to provide queries for items like, "give me all messages from >a given author." > > > I thought LDAP would be appropriate here because the data > > doesn't change. > >But LDAP is not really designed to do full text searching. LDAP's >roots come from X.500 which is basically a standard for providing >distributed directory services (address, organizations, etc). >The directory service is not intended to support transactions or >frequent modifications (but later X.500/LDAP implementations probably >handle data modification fairly efficiently). Read-only-based queries >is where X.500/LDAP is supposed to be very efficient and optimized for. > > > Are you saying MySQL is more appropriate? > >It could be, and some users have requested they would like such >a thing. However, when it comes to full text retrieval, traditional >RDBMS are not as efficient as full text search engines. Reason in >a nutshell: full text search engines index the data into structures >(like hashes) to provide fast query results while RDBMS is basically >doing a fancy grep wrt large text columns (which would be needed >to store message body text). > >Companies like Oracle do provide some fill text indexing add-ons >to their RDBMS, but I hear it takes some work to configure and >may not be that mature. > >If you have a lot of computing resources, you could dump everything >into a database and it can do all your searches. But it will not >scale well and will definitely not give you the performance of >full text search engines. You would also have to determine what >you want to do with attachments (probably store file references to >them instead of as blobs in the database), and since the text data >of messsage bodies can be large, this could impact how you design >your schema and overall database performance. > >Where RDBMS, or LDAP, can be very useful is in meta-based searches. >For example, storing message header information like mentioned above >to allow useful meta-based searches and dynamic archive navigation >capabilites beyond the static ones provided by MHonArc. > >In newer versions of MHonArc, a minimal Perl API exists to allow >something like this. The API is documented in an appendix section >of the documentation. In a nutshell, you can create a callback >function to take the message header data obtained from MHonArc, >and store that information into a RDBMS using the Perl DBI modules, >or if you like LDAP, you can use the Perl LDAP modules. > >--ewh > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To sign-off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the >message text UNSUBSCRIBE MHONARC-USERS
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