Re: Longhorn Killer

[Rogelio Serrano]

--- Raffael Herzog <herzog-lists@raffael.ch> wrote:
On Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:57:32 -0800 (PST), Rogelio Serrano 
<rogelio@smsglobal.net> wrote:

> One of my basic problems is sorting and searching my emails. I have 10k 
> plus in my mail folders already. Searching seems so slow and its 
> difficult to search based on content. I think it goes for all my other 
> files too. I tried writing all emails to individual files and using sym 
> links but that was worse. It thrashed my hard disk like crazy.
>
> I realize now that its really inefficient to use a database as a 
> filesystem. Specially mysql or any other client server rdbms.

Well, now you're contradicting yourself. DB based systems can solve 
exactly the problems you're referring to in the first paragraph I quoted. 
As an example (and to get even more off-topic ;): Look at Opera's M2. I'm 
managing the mails of three IMAP and two NNTP accounts with this thing, 
there must be tens of thousands of messages, not a single one of them 
stored locally on my computer -- and believe it or not: I find the message 
I'm looking for within seconds. Why? Because M2 is a DB based system. 
Instead of using folders, it uses views to organise mail. You can look at 
them as SQL-Views, i.e. prepared SELECT statements on your mail/news -- on 
*all* of it, no matter where it's stored. Combined with quick access to 
several filters and a quick-search facility (incremental search on what's 
currently displayed), this is a very efficient system.

DBs are made for such tasks, the need for managing huge amounts of data 
and still quickly finding what you're looking for is actually the reason 
why they exist.

cu,
    Raffi

[snip]

I understand.

So can everything on your filesystem be organized as views? Can the root 
filesystem be organized that way? I actually thought so when I started this 
thread.

My original idea was to use a storage system on top of the filesystem. Since 
filesystems perform poorly with large numbers of really small files it would be 
logical to store small items together in bigger files. I thought that the notes 
data model as I understood it was simple enough for me to implement quickly.