Re: Am thinking of using subversion as a general purpose filing s ystem

andy.glew@amd.com wrote:
> How can you guarantee that the Berkeley DB files
> are accessed only by local processes?

Accessed in the sense of opened using the BDB libraries, not in the sense of
accessed at the filesystem level. BDB, even when accessing the database
readonly, frequently needs to write temporary files.

>
> For example, if you are running an indexing utility
> remotely, could that corrupt the files?

Are you indexing file _contents_ or file _names_? Is this one of those stupid
M$loth programs to improve marginal searching by exercising your HD's and CPU at
all times? I turn those off as a matter of course and do the same for Linux
indexers; the number of times I have to search fulltext is so small compared to
the amount of CPU cycles it would waste to preindex makes it ludicrous. But in
either of these cases, the mere accessing the BDB files at the filesystem level
has no possible way of corrupting the file.

>
> Similarly, sometimes it's more convenient to run backup
> utilities remotely.

Just like [most?] other databases, you can backup the database file itself, but
in order to ensure that the data is recoverable, you have to follow whatever
methodology the database supports. Both Oracle and M$SQL typically have plugins
to the backup software or you use an export file. BDB offers incremental
backups in a similar fashion. In most cases, you just exclude the database
files themselves from the backup, since they are not useful as backups.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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