[OpenAFS] Re: why afs backup is so poorly supported

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2006 04:18:44 PM -0400 chas williams - CONTRACTOR 
<chas@cmf.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:

> In message <A729EC0A89BF65A6D0C26B96@sirius.fac.cs.cmu.edu>,Jeffrey
> Hutzelman w rites:
>> On the other hand, usenet servers have soundly beaten us to taking the
>> next  logical step, which is to punt entirely on using a general-purpose
>> filesystem and instead use a purpose-built data store.
>
> i have wondered about this.  others have posted about it but i havent seen
> any work done in this direction.  would it be useful for the fileserver
> to talk to a database backend?  this would instantly get a "logging"
> afs filesytem (assuming your database supported this).  transactions
> would be known to be atomic (instead of hoping they are using fsync).
> there wouldnt be any confusion about "what are these files".

It's an interesting idea, though probably more suitable for discussion on 
openafs-devel than in this forum.  To handle StoreData, you'd need the 
ability to update only part of a blob.  Also, how efficiently are large 
blobs handled even by those databases that support them?