Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 09:06:45 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de> Cc: shimon@simon-shapiro.org, freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG, andreas@klemm.gtn.com, scrappy@hub.org, Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.ORG>, Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Subject: Re: [PORTS] Pgaccess doesn't run on -current anymore, Update Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330084814.485S-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <19980330123130.39177@caramba.cs.tu-berlin.de>
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On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Wolfram Schneider wrote: > On 1998-03-29 13:57:30 -0800, Simon Shapiro wrote: > > We have been playing with the idea of normalizing the archive into an > > RDBMS. Some of the benefits are: > > > > * no need to update the threads database. It will always be updated. > > * Users can create, easily, their own thread logic with no impact on > > system performance. > > * Searching on normalized fields are many times faster, and much less > > costly in system resources. [snip] > If you plan to use a real SQL database, you should consider at least > 500,000 data sets, better 1 million. You need 2GB for the raw E-Mails > and 2-4GB for the index. I don't know if there are free available > databases which can handle this large data. It has been well established for many years by professionals in database R&D that traditional a RDBMS are utterly and completely the wrong tool for free text searching. This turns out to be true even for some relatively structured data types like bibliographic records. There *are* some tasks in a real-world applications that are RDBMS type things--a message-id based thread index is simple to implement for instance--so I'm all for hybrid systems. The big RDBMS vendors usually have some optional module optimized for free-text searching module and some SQL extensions to access it. I've pondered writing such a module for postgres, but don't really know enough about extending postgres to know how well it would work. -john To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message
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