Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Linking to particular article?

[Bob Dodd]

--- Tom Chance <address@hidden> wrote:
[snip]
> Why would you not have the articles themselves in the
> database? I mean storage space wise it makes sense to
> keep them there, in terms of accessing the article
> itself it makes sense (its faster to acces it from a
> database, rather than to get the referral from the
> database to an individual file), and it would be
> easier to update in the database (you would look up
> the article then change it, instead of looking up its
> referring point in the db then finding the article
> itself and changing that).

It depends on the database, but how very large objects are retrieved
from the db could affect its peformance, compared to simply returning a
reference to a file located on another server (with the latter system,
you can share the load a bit more evenly between machines).

The real advantaged to having the content inside the db are in:

1) Mirroring: the db can be easily configured to mirror without special
software/scripts to make it work. Any db integrity checking s/w will
also usually only check what is *inside* the db.

2) Version control: assuming you have a colum for version ID, all the
previous versions of an entry are in the db, have an unique key, and
and hence easily referenced from other entries.

I think you have to look at real impelementations & hardware
configurations to know which way to jump on this one.

/Bob Dodd





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