Timo Sirainen wrote: > On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 14:33 -0700, Seth Mattinen wrote: >> Timo Sirainen wrote: >>> This is something I figured out a few months ago, mainly because this >>> one guy at work (hi, Stu) kept telling me my multi-master replication >>> plan sucked and we should use some existing scalable database. (I guess >>> it didn't go exactly like that, but that's the result anyway.) >>> >> Ick, some people (myself included) hate the idea of storing mail in a >> database versus simple and almost impossible to screw up plain text >> files of maildir. > > Nothing forces you to switch from maildir, if you're happy with it :) > But if you want to support millions of users, it's simpler to distribute > the storage and disk I/O evenly across hundreds of servers using a > database that was designed for it. And by databases I mean here some of > those key/value-like databases, not SQL. (What's a good collective name > for those dbs anyway? BASE and NoSQL are a couple names I've seen.) >
Why is a database a better choice than a clustered filesystem? It seems that you're adding a huge layer of complexity (a database) for something that's already solved (clusters). Queue directories and clusters don't mix well, but a read-heavy maildir/dbox environment shouldn't suffer the same problem. ~Seth