big erlang web solution

[bryan rasmussen]

> Just out of curiosity, what kind of characteristics are you looking
> for in a distributed file system? I'm in the initial stages of
> building a web application that needs to store files on disc (not huge
> files, probably only images), and my planned approach at the moment is
> to store file metadata and pointer to physical location in a
> distributed database -- either MySQL or Mnesia (I prefer Mnesia, but
> at the moment, it looks like I'm going to have to use MySQL to store
> at least some of my data, so I might end up using MySQL exclusively --
> I haven't made up my mind yet). What's the primary motivation for
> using a distributed file system over a database-backed approach?


It has been my experience (limited), and my observation that a
filesystem approach scales better than an exclusive database approach
and is furthermore more maintable because scaling a large database
based solution often requires further optimization, changes to the
database. Thus I like to keep database usage to a minimum. I also do
not like to keep web data, documents, or similar things in a database
because it is not likely to be especially well suited to
representation in a database in the same way that customer records
are. At any rate for the maintainability issue, I don't want to go
mucking about in the database and my schemas if I want to do an
upgrade of my app.

The caveat about filesystem scaling better is however that an
optimized filesystem is supposed.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen