From: Fred Lindberg
Date: March 17 1999 8:27pm
Subject: Re: Record size
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/448
Message-Id: <19990317203005.14454.qmail@id.wustl.edu>
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On Wed, 17 Mar 1999 15:12:42 -0500 (EST), Eric Savage wrote:

>We are planning a messaging database, and we would like to allow messages
>to be up to 500 kilobytes. We will be splitting it amongst tables to keep
>the file sizes below 2G, but what I would like to know is if MySQL can
>perform well with such large fields?  I know the mediumblob/mediumtext
>type will hold this much, I would just like to know if there are any
>special considerations that we would need to make when building this?
>Does anyone know of any email/messaging packages that are available out
>there?  No sense reinventing the wheel if we can avoid it.

This is a job for the built-in highly optimized database of your OS:
the file system.

Store the messages as files and store keys and file names in the MySQL
database. Use some subdirectory system so that you don't get more than
a few thousand (assuming linux & ext2fs) files per directory. Web
caches do this very efficiently. Look at squid if you want coding
examples.

For info on mail systems, see a previous message available by mailing
mysql-get441@stripped.

-Sincerely, Fred

(Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)