How to best do zillions of little files?

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

I once worked for a company where the files were stored hierarchially by 
date. A database was used to maintain an index to the files. Most of the 
files were simply archival. In the event that the database needed to be 
rebuilt, a simple Unix find could rebuild the database. Very simple, very 
reliable. Most of the files were stored on removable optical disks, and the 
more recent files were online on magnetic media. In this particular case, 
Solaris was used because Linux did not have the drivers available for the 
optical jukebox. The actual file name was the customer number, and there 
could be multiple files, but not at the same date/time directory. The 
database was only concerned with the most recent online record. The files 
themselves were compressed files containing both graphical and text 
information. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9