Re: help w/ a little naive brainstorming ...

On Mar 25, 2005, at 6:16 PM, OpenMacNews wrote:

> if i were to consider 'storing' those messages trees, instead, in a
> pgsql db, i i mmediately/naively think of three possible options
>
> (a) simple DB-stored references to flat file:/// locations
> (b) pointers to external, actionable (parseable? writeable?) files in
> the FS
> (c) messages stored, in their entirety as CLOBS and/or BLOBS in the DB
> (d) messages converted into, say, XML, and stored in the DB
> (e) message components parsed into individual fields, and stored as
> addressable character and 'bytea' (a new one on me ...) data in pgsql
> tables
>
> any thoughts/comments as to 'best approach' and why?
>

If you were going to the trouble of using a database, I can't think of
many reasons to not just store them in regular columns with various
components parsed out for searching. There are several examples of such
systems you might want to look into:

http://www.manitou-mail.org/ (just announced)
http://yukatan.sourceforge.net/ (has links for other similar projects)

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL