From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-06-02T08:43:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Database vs Filesystem

Sven Schott wrote:
> Pstore is a bit too simple as I need something that handles multiple 
> clients and I don't really want to write a transaction engine(I'm hardly 
> qualified), so MySQL(or Post) would be my first choice. I just really 
> wanted to know if using the MySQL ruby libraries would be faster or 
> slower than the File ruby library. How well would ruby handle passing 
> binary data to MySQL? How fast would it be? Should I just stick to file 
> operations?

As an alternative to PStore, there is my FSDB library[1]. Like PStore, 
it's pure ruby. But instead of putting everything in one file, it makes 
multiple files look like a database, of sorts. Also, it's thread and 
process safe and has simple transactions. It allows multiple back-end 
formats for objects: strings (binary or ascii), marshal, yaml, etc.

I don't expect it will be as fast as as a true database, but it is 
convenient to be able to access your "database" as a normal file tree.

[1] http://redshift.sourceforge.net/fsdb-0.4