johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu (09/01/88)
The "notesfile" news package, developed at the U. of Illinois by Ray Essick, uses a database to store articles instead of using the file system. While this scheme is space-efficient, it makes it impossible to grep for articles or use other Unix tools on them. The reader can do a lot of different kinds of searches, but that makes it just one more complicated tool to learn and it still is not as flexible as the Unix tools. All in all, it is not obvious to me that using a specialized database is a good idea. A general purpose database would have lots of searching tools of its own that you could use, but it would probably lose on efficiency.