Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Linking to particular article?

[Tom Chance]

--- Hook <address@hidden> wrote: > Tom
Chance wrote:
> > > An article will often comprise a number of
> segments,
> > > each of which may be a
> > > media type other than text. It's not efficient
> use
> > > of a database to store
> > > large binary objects in a table - MySQL
> themselves
> > > recommend against it,
> > > although they agree that the database *will*
> handle
> > > it. Just not
> > > efficiently.
> >
> > You wouldn't store things like pictures and movies
> IN
> > the mySQL databse! But it would be more efficient
> to
> > store text in a database, rather than as many XML
> > files. Especially if you OPTIMIZE it often.
> >
> > >
> > > The same is usually true with large chunks of
> text.
> > > An encyclopedia is
> > > going to get a lot of hits, so one of the
> > > design/implementation criteria
> > > must be performance. For example, you try hard
> *not*
> > > to use varchar in a
> > > table. Use of a single one has an effect on the
> > > performance of all data in
> > > that table. Use of TEXT in any of it's
> > > manifestations has a similar
> > > side-effect in MySQL.
> > Varchars are better to keep to a minimun, but even
> so
> > a database with many varchars and text fields
> would
> > still be more efficient than a large XML
> filesystem.
> >
> >
> > > Throwing hardware at performance problems is a
> > > partial solution, true, but
> > > designing for performance up-front is a better
> > > start.
> > Databasing is performance up-front. Many files
> would
> > need better hardware to get comparable speeds.
> 
> Not entirely I'm afraid.  If that was really true,
> then Usenet would use a
> database rather than either lots of small files (and
> in the case of net news
> it's the huge number of tiny files which causes
> trouble), and it doesn't.
> The closest is diabolo which uses a small number of
> enormous files with
> comprehensive indexing.
> 
> I'd lean towards letting UNIX handle the articles
> (XML, text, word documents
> or whatever), and have a database handle the meta
> data - author, title,
> keywords etc.  UNIX after all is pretty good with
> text files.
> 
> Paul


That's certainly the next solution after a full
database. And I think it would be best to save the
articles as text files, and make a perl script parse
and format them to be displayed as simple HTML. Then
you could keep all these <author> and <date> tags that
have been mentioned for XML.

Tom Chance

=====
"True security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated 
individual effort - Fyodor Dostoyevsky"

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