[Asterisk-Dev] Re: PostgreSQL support in Asterisk 1.2?

[snacktime]

On 8/5/05, Andrew Kohlsmith <akohlsmith-asterisk at benshaw.com> wrote:
> On Friday 05 August 2005 11:12, Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> > > Yes that's right, I said RealTime is a bad thing.
> 
> > I wouldn't put MySQL near anything critical either, but I find it strange
> > that people are hung up on the "DB" being a point of failure, when we're
> > talking about asterisk here...
> 
> Why would you take your PBX, a critical piece of communications equipment and
> tie it to a DB server ...  something else that can have HDD or PS failure, or
> introduce into its decision/routing path the possibility of something like
> the latest Outlook worm which could flood the switch and knock your voice
> quality out?
>

I do understand the logic, but like anything it's all a balance.  I
can see advantages of having asterisk query a database directly. 
Right now asterisk doesn't handle database failures very well (you
will lose your config if you reload and the database is down when
using realtime static), and that should be fixed.   Realtime static I
see as a very good compromise where you can have the advantages of
using a database directly without the drawbacks.  Assuming the above
problem is fixed, if the database is down the negative affects of
having * query the database directly versus pulling from text files
generated from a database are really the same.  In both cases * keeps
it's current configuration until the database is back up.

For *real* Realtime, I'm pretty much in agreement with you.  The
balance is not in favor of using it unless the circumstances really
call for it.

Chris