[thelist] database question

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Lumir G Janku [SMTP:lgjanku@w3matrix.com]
> Sent:	Friday, March 17, 2000 6:50 PM
> To:	thelist@lists.evolt.org
> Subject:	RE: [thelist] database question
> 
> *** Warning : This message originates from the Internet ***
> 
> 
> I don't care is someone is a god of databases or god of whatever.
[Burns, Martin]  There are some people I respect because they
have been doing this a very, very long time and are very, very
good. There are even quite a few on this list.

> In Perl, you can do several things...
> You can write your own subroutine to lock a file for a short time period 
> that the file is written to. Or use "flock" to lock it exclusively for the
> 
> time that the file has to be written to. 
[Burns, Martin]  It may surprise you to discover that I know this.

> From that follows that although it 
> may seem that two users are updating at the same time, it is never the 
> case, they update it in a linear sequence, first come first served.
[Burns, Martin]  Nice for small files. Not nice for larger ones.

> If only you have the access to updates, you can download the data file, 
> open it in TextPad, edit it (it's after all a text file) and once you're 
> finished, upload it. Works great for global replacements.
[Burns, Martin]  The qualifying statement there is key. Of course,
you still don't know which processes are accessing your data.

Templates I'm happy about uploading on the fly. Data? No.

> It all depends what you want. It the data has to be updated constantly by 
> many users and chances are that they may be accessing the same record, it 
> may be better to use a RDB (unix systems usually support mSQL, or MySQL).
> That is not to say that well written Perl script can't handle it,
> though...
[Burns, Martin]  It's not the Perl bit I'm arguing with (Perl has DB methods
available as you well know - /. uses Perl and handles a hell of a load),
it's the flat file data structure.

For small datafiles, yes it's fine. But it's not a good all purpose
solution.

Cheers
Martin


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