Tuesday, March 10, 2009

What RAF really looks like...

We all know that inside the body is nothing like the familiar outside... so bad analogy aside, this is how RAF looks from inside.

Those familiar with SQL, you know what you're seeing... others, think about it as a big MICROSOFT EXCEL spreadsheet. It's the RAF Forum's Database.


WildWeathel said...

Wow, the messages table is 71 MiB? For comparison, I just ran 'du -ch *.pdf' on the e-books. 35MiB.

The PDFs are compressed, while I'm sure the database isn't (for performance reasons). Text compresses at about 2:1, so we can estimate that... new-RAF has generated about as much text since May as the complete Animorphs series. Cool, in a random-stats sort of way.

WildWeathel said...

To put those numbers in perspective, a megabyte of uncompressed text is a typical good-sized novel (2000 characters per page by 500 pages). RAF's messages table is 71 MiB, or about 70 big novels, or 35 thousand pages. That's just new RAF, the stuff since May. Impressive.

(Note, I'm not sure if the blog software lost my last comment when I selected my google account. Feel free to merge the two if not.)