Re: [PLUG] Help with Lawsuit

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 03:12:07PM -0400, Paul wrote:
> >Never seen that, and it'd be a totally stupid thing to do...
> I don't know who wrote what,

I wrote it. Hey  kids! This is why we cite our quotes out here on
the wild, weird Interweb!

> but, I have a general comment.  There are 
> data storage theories and methods that suggest that very infrequently 
> used data could be stored and retrieved from very slow, high capacity 
> media.  Data that is needed routinely and very quickly is to be stored 
> on faster media.  So, data that is only accessed once a year could be 
> kept on tape while data that is accessed daily could be kept on a hard 
> disk.  It kind of makes sense if you have an enormous amount of data.

Nah, that's a lousy heuristic these days. Petabytes of fast storage
are within the budget of most large companies and all governments
(maybe not at the state level) if they really need it. The standard
should be (and is, from what I've seen) how you access the data;
random versus straight through.

If I'm going to want one byte out of 10 million rows some time down
the line, but I haven't got a clue which byte or when, I want it
on disk. I'd *really* like to have the DB indexed on that field I
want, but if it turns out that usage shows I frequently want bytes
from a certain field in a given DB, I can always add an index later.

If I'm going to want to read the whole of a piece of data from
beginning to end every time I use it (do we use *any* data like this
on computers any more?[1]), then it makes way more sense to have it
on tape, because it's cheaper and I'll probably get it faster, since
the disk will probably have to service someone else's random access
request before I'm done reading.

[1] Legitimate question. I don't think we do. I certainly don't.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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