Re: [Pan-devel] Re: Move to database back-end

[Nathan Morell]

Tom Enterline wrote:

> We definitely need a vision. In the near term, it wouldn't surprise me
> if the version of PAN that implements the new backend had few
> user-visible changes - the new backend will involve substantial changes
> on it's own. Of course, once that's in place, other changes become much
> easier. 
>
> Tom

For a little while last night I though about the best possible Data 
Structure to use for large binary news groups. I would like to throw 
this out to everybody and get some general input on the subject.

A B or B(+|-) tree, of linked lists. Where the first node on the linked 
list contains information like the Sender, Subject, and a few other 
things. I though of this because I was annoyed with PAN's huge memory 
footprint and have used other newsreaders that don't take up as much, 
this led me to believe PAN wasn't using the best possible memory 
management. If we move to SQLite, (I'm not a huge DB guy) will this 
allow us to use data structures like the one mentioned above. Although 
not as in detail, I'm sure something could be done to keep the sort 
times and memory footprint low.

thanks in advance,
--Nathan