From: Albert Wagner <alwagner@...>
Date: 2001-12-10T04:38:34+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28039] Re: DBI and large result sets

Neil Conway wrote:

> On Sat, 2001-12-08 at 22:45, Albert Wagner wrote:
>> On Saturday 08 December 2001 09:28 pm, you wrote:
>> > On Fri, 2001-12-07 at 20:40, Ned Konz wrote:
>> > > (note: MySQL is built on top of BerkeleyDB).
>> >
>> > This is OT, but that's quite true. MySQL can create tables using one of
>> > several different table types. _One_ of these uses BerkeleyDB to
>> > support transactions, but if you're not using transactions it's
>> > suggested that you avoid it. And even if you want transactions, there
>> > may be other tables types that can do transactions without involving
>> > BerkeleyDB (maybe Gemini? I'm a PostgreSQL user, I'm only vaguely
>> > familiar with MySQL).
>> 
>> Why is it suggested that you avoid BerkeleyDB?
> 
> IIRC, because you pay a speed, memory and disk space penalty over the
> default MySQL table type (MyISAM). In exchange, you get transactions,
> but if you don't need those (and MySQL users typically don't), then you
> may be better of without BDB tables.
> 
> And last I checked, the code for BDB tables wasn't tested as thoroughly
> as the code for MyISAM, but that may well have changed.
> 

Just for the record:  I don't believe a word of this.