Re: Idea for the future

[Christopher Lindsey <lindsey@ncsa.uiuc.edu>]

> > Uh? So what exactly can you do with your MHonArc message files with
> > these tools that you couldn't do with a simple update query in SQL
> > server?
> 
> Full text search indexing.  Many indexing tools work best with regular
> files on not with data in a database, especially the free ones.  Basically
> any tools that works with regular files can be applied.

As a proponent of an SQL-based solution, I would really prefer to be
searching out of an SQL database.  My server ends up spending hours
indexing gigabytes of archives each night.  During that time, performance
is significantly reduced.  Not to mention the speed of searches -- glimpse
leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest advantage that I see is the distributed nature and redundancy
of SQL databases.  If configured properly, an update could propagate to
child servers.  Additionally, multiple Web servers could retrieve data
from the same source without relying on networked filesystems (NFS and
AFS really stink for this kind of thing).

> As I like to say: Different tools for different jobs, and not one
> tool is applicable, or appropriate, for all jobs.

I'm not trying to discount static text file usage; I just hope that
any future designs are extensible enough to accomodate other methods of
data insertion/extraction.  In the spirit of multiple tool use, some sort
of API would be awesome...  

I would be very interested in working on an SQL portion of this...

Chris