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From: fmayhar@hermes.ladc.bull.com (Frank Mayhar)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: What constitutes a good OS?
Message-ID: <1991Jan28.163906@hermes.ladc.bull.com>
Date: 27 Jan 91 20:08:06 GMT
References: <42488@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <5461@auspex.auspex.com> <42617@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <5510@auspex.auspex.com>
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Reply-To: fmayhar@hermes.ladc.bull.com
Organization: Bull HN Information Systems Inc. Los Angeles Development Center
Lines: 32

I'm coming into this kinda late.  Excuse me, I've been out of town.  But I
thought I'd throw some more mud on the fire.  :-)

In article <5510@auspex.auspex.com>, guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
> [a whole buncha stuff, most of which I agree with]
|> [Darren New writes:]
|> >Using directories as keyed files is something I consider as "the wrong
|> >tool."
|> 
|> Well, if you consider putting parts of keyed databases into separate
|> files based on the key values to be part of the reason it's using "the
|> wrong tool", you'd better let the folks doing Amoeba know you think
|> they're making a mistake.... :-)

OK, I will.  (I'm one of the CP6 people you've (lightly) bashed in earlier
postings.  I'm the guy, in fact, that maintains the File Management part of
the OS, including the ISAM-like and relational-database-like parts.)  Some
of my customers have databases consisting of *millions* of records, with the
same number of unique keys, and at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of
records with the same keys.  How would you like to have your bread-and-butter
database spread across two million different files on Amoeba?  Talk about a
maintenance headache!  And for large applications, that's a fairly
representative number.  Plus, it seems on the face of it (not knowing the
internals of Amoeba) that lookups would take *forever* under such a scheme.
It seems to me that combining all those different records into one file,
even if it's distributed across different devices, would make life much
more simple for everyone, and that it would significantly enhance database
performance.
--
Frank Mayhar  fmayhar@hermes.ladc.bull.com (..!{uunet,hacgate}!ladcgw!fmayhar)
              Bull HN Information Systems Inc.  Los Angeles Development Center
              5250 W. Century Blvd., LA, CA  90045    Phone:  (213) 216-6241