SPUG:CGI header question

[Chris Whip]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 09:56:48AM -0700, Peter Darley wrote:
>		Database limits are far less restricting than file system limits.  I don't
> know a lot about files systems, but it's my understanding that you are
> limited to the number of files in a single directory.

This is mostly untrue for modern operating systems.

  I do know a lot about
> databases however, and I know that there's no problem storing millions and
> millions of records in a single table.  If I exceeded the limits of the file
> system in a single directory I then have to start making trees of
> directories to hold all my files, which makes for a huge mess.  I currently
> have directories for a system I wrote that didn't store stuff in the
> database, and I can't go into the directory and do a 'rm -rf *' because
> there are more files than rm can deal with.

I've seen this problem, and the issue wasn't with rm or the file system.
It was with the shell.  It runs out of space to expand *. Solutions I've used
include deleting with ls and xargs, find, and perl.

This was about four years ago now. It may have gotten better. If anyone knows
why shells don't/didn't do dynamic allocation of memory for big * expansions,
I'd be curious.

>In general databases are far easier to work with.

Well, no. But you can do queries, and use transactions. It's a richer model.
That has benefits and costs.

-- Chris Whip