[news.software.anu-news] NEWS RDB?

Mats.Sundvall@bmc.uu.se (Mats Sundvall) (07/18/89)

One of the main disadvantages with news is the writing of a single file
for each entry. This is not very effeciant and it is difficult to implement
more sofisticated search commands. I have no idea of the how performance
is related to all this files but my feeling is that it is not very efficent.

I was looking into this problem some news releases ago and investigated the
possibility of reimplementing news with a commercial RDB. VAX SQL was on
my system and it did not seem very difficult to do the changes.

The disadvantage with this is that not every one has VAX SQL. I heard some
rumors about distribution of VAX SQL runtime system with VMS. This may solve
the problem but I have no hope.

While doing this I realised that one should extract all the database dependent
modules and define a layer for accessing news entries. This would make it easy
to take the database dependent parts and port them to whatever databse you
have in the future.

Comments?


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		Mats Sundvall			

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