DB Driven debian WAS RE: Caldera installation - something Debian should learn
On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Brimhall, GeoffreyX L wrote:
> The one advantage I've seen to storing data as text rather than as a
> proprietary data set accessible through 1 API is the issue of how to deal
> with the data when it gets corrupted.
Right so store data correction in your database. Then you don't have to
look through that database, it just corrects itself. Of course
this makes the files a lot larger(about 3 times) but what's the
total size of all files under /etc, maybe 10MB for a large system.
Not a big deal.
> When data gets corrupted, and it is in text format, there is somehow a
> confidence level because you can actually see where the corruption has
> occured and go on with trying to correct it.
>
> If the data is in a proprietary format, just about the best means for
> restoration is backup - which usually means a loss of data dependant on the
> time delta.
The API will be open.
> Ironically, the best example I've had to deal with to demonstrate this is to
> compare two different email systems: sendmail and Microsoft's Exchange.
> Exchange is proprietary, whereas sendmail has it's data stored as text.
>
> I have never had an Exchange server up which did not at some point suffer
> data corruption. And try my best to correct the issues with thier recovery
> tools, almost always I've had to end up doing a backup recovery.
>
> Sendmail, while a pain-in-the-ass to setup (especially compared to
> Exchange), 1) has much fewer times when the system goes down or the data
> gets corrupted, 2) when data corruption has occured, I've been able to
> restore the email with minimal loss (usually affecting just one or two
> people) because of the fact everthing was stored as text.
OK. But you must admit sendmail is a much more mature piece of software
than exchange. Fundamentally exchange will always be feature driven.
This never produces good software. Need driven software does.
+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| R Garth Wood | Making waves... |
| Stormix Technologies Inc. | |
| rgwood@stormix.com | |
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