Best way to backup cyrus system

[Jay Levitt]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Siemborski" <rjs3 at andrew.cmu.edu>
To: "Alessandro Oliveira" <alessandro.o at nunoferreira.com.br>
Cc: <php at gurubase.com>; <info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 3:28 PM
Subject: Re: Best way to backup cyrus system


> On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Alessandro Oliveira wrote:
>
> > I'm planning to code a database backend (postgres/mysql/oracle) in the
> > future to handle the storage, but this will take time and money, but I
> > think it is the way to go.
> >
> > What do you think about this ?
>
> I'm not convinced this will be even close to easy to do, since it will
> require a lot of thought as to how to optimize the SQL queries for IMAP.

That is an understatement.  The AOL mail system back end, while predating
IMAP, actually has a similar structure, and it essentially sits on top of
databases.  For the AOL client, that's no problem, but because of the huge
flexibility that IMAP gives a client in structuring queries, it's next to
impossible to make a truly efficient database back end for it.  When we
added minimal IMAP client support for CompuServe users, we had to make all
sorts of special tweaks and assumptions and limitations and caching kludges.
It's unbelievably tricky.  Expect to spend a few years on it.

Jay Levitt