[lug] Industrial Strength DB (was: StarOffice)

[Aaron Crane]

"Precision Solutions, Inc." <kevin at precisonline.com> writes:
> >In my case an "industrial strength" database has to be able to handle at
> >least 100,000 records (I'm not there yet but it may well exceed that
> >before I'm done) {even if I have to buy a huge hard drive}
> 
> One of the issues we're facing is the 2GB max file size on Linux/Unix.
> Under this cap, however, there's no reason why any number of records
> couldn't be stored.

Current GNU libc releases have the Single Unix LFS (Large File
Specification) functions.  LFS lets you use new libc functions such as
open64(), lseek64() with a new type off64_t for handling large files -- or
you can #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS to 64 before including any headers, and
magically off_t becomes 64 bits, and all your open(), lseek() calls work on
large files.  If your database goes through the block device interface, then
this is all you need.  If you use the filesystem, then ext2fs limits file
lengths to 16G for 1k blocks, 256G for 2k blocks, or 4096G for 4k blocks.

-- 
Aaron Crane   <aaron.crane at pobox.com>   <URL:http://pobox.com/~aaronc/>