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Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#35

Post by alexvr »

If the point of getting a forum site running on a Raspberry Pi is just for novelty & challenge, ignore this. But I think the most practical solution here is to forget the Raspberry Pi altogether or to set up the majority of processing and storage on a separate machine and have the Raspberry Pi server talk to it.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#36

Post by jaeh »

azeirah wrote: post #17

Hi there, you ask interesting questions. I have two things for you that aren't exactly what you're looking for, but they are definitely relevant. First of all, a while ago I made a serverless chat for in your browser. It's just a proof of concept, it does work however. There will be nobody there, but you can test it by opening two browser tabs or using a second device. It works in the same way that Skype works, peer…

all hail eris! all hail discordia! kallisti.

the goddess looks at this creation and she is happy.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#37

Post by chippy »

FeatureRush wrote: post #5

Have a look at 4chan - once the thread is done, it's gone, no need for db for that and the community is still there.

I remember reading that 4chan saved each page as just that, static pages. The server saves to each page when a new comment is posted to the relevant page and serves up pages based on last modified times.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#38

Post by mozboz »

Yes.

People (including me) are thinking about and working on personally owned and hosted data. Your forum posts live in _your_ cloud, and in a way that the features as brickcap describes are achievable.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049890

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#39

Post by gedrap »

Depends on your goal.

If you want to learn a lot about development, write a lot of code, you can use flat files and treat them as a small database. Implement simple SQL analogues of WHERE, etc. It could definitely be fun to implement! A lot of educational value. You would learn more about designing APIs consumed by other applications, etc.

But if you just want something that would run on r-pi, you would be better off by using a standard database. Some of them are around for over a decade, written in C and thousands of men hours were spent on optimizing them. As long as you are not doing something a bit crazy (e.g. 3 fields in WHERE statement, non of them are indices), you will be just fine.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?

#40

Post by userbinator »

FeatureRush wrote: post #5

Have a look at 4chan - once the thread is done, it's gone, no need for db for that and the community is still there.

I don't know about now since I don't visit 4chan anymore, but the imageboards very clearly used a DB - during periods of high load one of the most common error messages was "MySQL connection error" which became a sort of minor meme for a while (this was several years ago.)

On the other hand the textboards do appear to not use a traditional RDBMS - they were running a modified version of Shiichan (http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/shiichan ); Kareha (http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/web/wakaba_kareha ) is another popular textboard script that doesn't need a database.

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