From: Rob Shein (shoten@starpower.net)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 14:59:49 EST
It's not a question of peak performance as much as consistency. Flat files
aren't meant to work this way; that's largely why database applications work
the way they do in the first place. If something like paging competes for
drive access just long enough, the whole thing can go to hell. When you're
opening a graphic or text file completely into memory to view or edit it?
For that, sure, a flat file is faster. But when you're streaming through a
flat file that's dozens of gigs in size, over an extended period of time
while running the data into a memory and processor-intensive program at the
same time? Try it, and just see how quickly that works over the length of
the entire file compared to a database :)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: johnadams [mailto:johnadams@apple.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 1:30 PM
> To: Rob Shein
> Cc: 'No Man'; pen-test@securityfocus.com
> Subject: Re: Cisco LEAP
>
>
> On Saturday, November 1, 2003, at 08:58 PM, Rob Shein wrote:
> >
> > Regarding questions 1 and 2:
> >
> > I'm not hugely familiar with the problem that LEAP has, but
> looking at
> > this
> > challenge from a logistical standpoint, I would say that
> you'd be far
> > better
> > off with a database containing the dictionary than a flat file, for
> > performance reasons.
>
> Not that I've been following this discussion that closely, but since
> when do databases perform faster than
> flat files on read?
>
> If he was performing searches against data, sure, the
> database would be
> faster because it could take advantage of search algorithms, but even
> then data stored (sorted) in a binary-tree flat file would crush the
> database in terms of raw performance time because it wouldn't
> have deal
> with database overhead.
>
> -john
>
>
>
>
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