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I have no specific knowledge of the Domino database format, but extrapolating from my knowledge of database storage formats in general: the database file almost
by dcrazy 2y ago
I have no specific knowledge of the Domino database format, but extrapolating from my knowledge of database storage formats in general: the database file almost certainly contained data structures of fixed size. Many of the fields in these data structures likely contained offsets to other data structures, such as an index that contains the offsets of each item. Fixing the size limit would require migrating to a new file format with different data structures. Migrations are always hard to sell to customers and a ripe opportunity for data corruption, and horizontal sharding can solve the same problem while also addressing other scalability and reliability issues.
- nradov 2y agoI never claimed that changing database file formats was easy, but IBM had already increased the size limit once before from 4GB to 64GB. So obviously increasing it further could have been done. Unfortunately IBM leadership never saw Domino as anything more than a platform for small internal corporate IT applications so they didn't care about fixing the limitations; it was a total failure of vision. IBM didn't provide any tools for horizontal sharding either. We had to roll our own, which was a huge expense and made every part of the application far more complex. And it actually made reliability worse; because displaying incomplete data was not acceptable to customers, if any one database got corrupted then everything failed.