simplicity vs safety with complexity

[Matthias Andree]

Tom Anderson <tanderso at oac-design.com> writes:

> different database?  All of my linux systems have MySQL installed... how
> about that?  It would fit in great with typical LAMP environments.  Or
> maybe Postgre?

My personal sympathy for MySQL is exactly zero, building PostgreSQL on
the SQLite3 basis shouldn't be too difficult.

> Or how about using a running backup where two identical
> wordlists are synchronized, a change is made to one, db_verify is run on
> it, and if it doesn't verify, resync with the backup, else bring the
> backup up to date?

Sounds complicated and not tailored to our corruption problem.

>> Now that #2 is working well and people have experience with both
>> transactional and non-transactional versions, an informed choice can be
>> made.  This choice will affect the default mode for bogofilter 1.0 and
>> beyond. 
>
> I haven't used transactions yet in bogofilter.  My opinion is still just
> formed from reading posts on this list.  Making transactional databases
> in MySQL seems easier though, and you get row-level locking with InnoDB
> tables.

Does InnoDB provide full transactional consistency guarantees, ACID? If
it does not, we don't want it.

> Well, part of the problem is that we've been spoiled with the simple,
> easy, vulnerable version.  We want the transaction version to be just as
> simple.  If 1.0 launched with transactions as default, new users would
> come on board having no other experience, and may just pick it up
> quickly.  Or they may give up, uninstall, and bash us on blogs.

It cannot be 100% as simple.

-- 
Matthias Andree