Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 21:38:43 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, nadav@cs.Technion.AC.IL, jandrese@mitre.org, acahalan@cs.uml.edu Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <200105242138.OAA22909@usr05.primenet.com>
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] Terry Lambert writes: ] ] > I don't understand the inability to perform the trivial ] > design engineering necessary to keep from needing to put ] > 60,000 files in one directory. ] > ] > However, we can take it as a given that people who need ] > to do this are incapable of doing computer science. ] ] One could say the same about the design engineering necessary ] to handle 60,000 files in one directory. You're making excuses. No, I'm not. I released trie patches for FreeBSD directory sotrage in 1995. No one thought they were very useful, because only morons would treat a filesystem as if it were a database, instead of using a database as a database. If you want to get technical, a filesystem is a form of a database... but it's a _hierarchical_ database, like DNS or LDAP, and trying to use it as a _relational_ database, with key/value pairs, is still a stupid idea. Use the right tool for the job. ] People _want_ to do this, and it often performs better on ] a modern filesystem. This is not about need; it's about ] keeping ugly hacks out of the app code. ] ] http://www.namesys.com/5_1.html I'm glad you said "people want to do this" instead of saying "computer professionals want to do this". The 60,000 file "benchmark" is meaningless to a properly designed system. ] > (the rationale behind this last is that people who can't ] > design around needing 60,000 files in a single directory ] > are probably going to to be unable to correctly remember ] > the names of the files they created, since if they could, ] > then they could remember things like ./a/a/aardvark or ] > ./a/b/abominable). ] ] Eeew. "./a/b/abominable" is a disgusting old hack used to ] work around traditional filesystem deficiencies. No, it's a hack to work around being too damn lazy to use a database where it makes sense to use a database. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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