seen file corruption

[Rob Siemborski]

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Richard Houston wrote:

> It would be very cool to have the actual messages stored in database as
> well. The dbmail project is doing this in Mysql or Postgresql. Imagine
> the maturity of Cyrus with all the benefits of storage and backup in a
> database. Would be cool.

Except that the benefits of Cyrus are lost, for the most part, if you
change the mail store.  The parser APIs that lie on top of the mail store
are almost trivial to implement compared to the data storage (and
retrieval) mechanisms themselves.

Cyrus gets its high performance from clever indexing and caching of
information in each mailbox.  If you gut all this code and replace it with
a database, you've removed the primary benefit!

Additionally, you've probably lost some performance because the speed of
Cyrus's store (optimized for IMAP) is going to be hard to beat with a
generic database.  Not impossible, but its really not something we're
interested in doing for the foreseeable future.

As it is, I have trouble understanding why anyone would want to make a
cyrusdb out of a relational database.  Cyrusdb provides simple key/value
pairs, where a relational database is providing a lot more, and has more
overhead.  If you want to be able to access this data (internal to cyrus)
from another application, you're asking for serious trouble.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper