databases

[Matthias Andree]

Greg Louis <glouis at dynamicro.on.ca> writes:

> Hasn't broken in my hands in three-ish years of moderately heavy use. 
> I have no experience of the other free DBs but I'd recommend MySQL as
> adequately robust for an average RDBMS application.  IMHO bogofilter

Is adequately robust equivalent to absolutely robust? If not, then we'd
be where we are now. "It works most of the time" is the current state.

> decidedly isn't an RDBMS application, though -- we need speed and
> simplicity.

The problem is that we don't use BerkeleyDB in a robust way when it
comes to updating the data base. Read-only is fine and fast. However,
once we bump into an obstacle while writing, the data base is
corrupt. Disk full is one such example, failed locking (although I don't
see that currently unless NFS comes into play -- broken NFS locking
implementations might hose the thing) is another.

I'd like to save the user rebuilding the data base to the maximum extent
possible. I understand that BDB with transactions or heavy-duty data
bases such as PostgreSQL are slower on writes, however, if it saves the
user the rebuild, we might consider doing that.

OTOH, I would only start a transaction per mail registered, or maybe
even per dozen of mails, to make sure the beast runs fast enough.

-- 
Matthias Andree