flannery - 1:09 am on Apr 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

can i take the drive which currently has the inappropriate filesystem and remount it with the appropriate filesystem?

all i understand about mounting the disk is that i type

mount /dev/something /somethingelse

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as for the sql scheme, this is my current situation:

i use the millions of files so that i can take any word queried by a user and just attach a file-suffix to the word and open a specific file for reading.

eg if they search for eastwood, it will take the first letter, E and open a file called ..../.../E/eastwood.suffix

so in other words, a user's query becomes simply the naming of a file to be opened.

will sql truly work faster than that? the file, in case you're curious, contains a list of product pages, except the list is boiled down to tiny identifiers which can similarly be prefixed by something (a url) to lead to the appropriate page; that, in turn, is also opened in a similar way, taking the identifier and using it to open yet another microscopic text file.

each file in this second haul is a single row in a database of 3 million rows.

i got forced into this method after my database expanded enormously, my original searching methods caused my server to get totally overloaded and my site to lose much of its utility and profit whilst i poked around for a viable, immediate solution

when i first started using sql i had a table with an entry for every product and i was getting it to look for keyword matches in each of about 3 million product descriptions - which proved insanely slow.

the system i developed in which i created the millions of keyword entries has not yet been put into sql by me.

i originally thought that it would be pointless, since opening a file with a given filename seemed like something a machine could do instantaneously.

but you've got me wondering now.

if i have a command in a perl script which is

open (file, "<filename.suffix");

and the file happens to be one of 3 or 4 million,

then is it going to have to process anything difficult to open that file, or will it do it just as easily as it would if there were only 5 files on the same disk?

if the answer is that it would do it just as easily, then i reckon i don't need sql. if it is not, then i totally believe you and will certainly move the keyword database to sql in the fullness of time.