> Ultimately, computers should be a tool that serves the needs of > people. Telling people not to use email they way they *want* to use > email is not an ideal situation. Sometimes one has to adapt to the > limitation of a system, but when possible, it's better to adapt the > system to better do the job.
Okay... I want to use my car to go 85 mph down the highway, but I have people telling me not to use it that way. I want to use my screwdriver as a pry bar, but there are people telling me not to use it that way. There are people who want to use their computer to download pirated music and movies from the internet, but there are people telling them not to use it that way. There are people who want to connect various USB devices to the company computers, but there are people telling them not to use it that way. There are people who want to use their computer to go to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., but there are people telling them not to use it that way. There are people who would like to use their computer to hack into corporate businesses, but... -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:mailvor...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 6:29 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Exchange archiving On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:11 PM, John Cook <john.c...@pfsf.org> wrote: >> But why isn't an e-mail system a file transfer and storage system? > > Because it's a database app with performance limits as opposed to a file > server. [This message is somewhat vague theory, somewhat devil's advocate, and somewhat philosophy, but I think this is a discussion worth having.] Fundamentally, and from a high level, a database and a filesystem are not all that dissimilar. Indeed, in a lot of the historical literature I've read from the 1940s and 1950s, there isn't a clear distinction between the two. That idea came later. It's not like a filesystem doesn't magically not have performance lists. Do a directory of a folder with tens of thousands of files in it sometime. Slow. Databases and filesystems generally have different optimization goals and feature sets, of course. And that's some of the reason why trying to move large files out of Exchange is a good idea. ESE doesn't do well at that, and NTFS does. But there's more to it than that. As many have said, having more than a few thousand items in a single folder slows Outlook and Exchange way down. See above about large NTFS directories. Both are slow, so going to NTFS simple moves the problem around. One could point to the performance wins that fixed sized records give you in a contiguous file, and that's a reason why databases are good at that. But ESE (Exchange^W Extensible Storage Engine) doesn't use that model, as far as I know. More importantly, I would argue that a mail system has more in common with a filesystem than a traditional database anyway. Message body lengths vary hugely. That's more like files than fixed-length records. Ultimately, computers should be a tool that serves the needs of people. Telling people not to use email they way they *want* to use email is not an ideal situation. Sometimes one has to adapt to the limitation of a system, but when possible, it's better to adapt the system to better do the job. -- Ben ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
