Re: link() security

H. Peter Anvin
2002-04-15T23:14:40Z

Alan Cox wrote:
>>>And then unrealized when they hit performance limitations. Its a trade off
>>>and one that most news systems seem to prefer to use a custom database
>>>for
>>
>>Well, a database is basically a custom filesystem.
>
> I would have to disagree. There are fundamentally different transaction
> semantics between the two as well as indexing constraints. I can't for
> example find commit() and rollback() in posix.1 8)
>

OK, perhaps I should have been more explicit...

A filesystem is *one kind* of database.

The operations that various databases implement differ -- not all
databases have commit()/rollback(), nor do all of them implement
relationals, object linking, etc.

The point was mostly that storing mail in a (basically) unstructured
flat-file format isn't really consistent with the operations you want to
perform on it. I didn't mean the directory/file format was necessarily
the ultimate solution, only that (a) it works better than mbox, (b) it's
been around for a long time.

-hpa