ntdb for Samba 4.2?

[Rusty Russell]

Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> writes:
> Rusty (and the rest of the team),
>
> What do you consider the status of ntdb to be for the upcoming Samba 4.2
> and beyond?
>
> Is this an effort you are still working on, as I've not seen any
> activity from you in the past year other than adding the manpages.
>
> What are your plans here?  
>
> Thanks,

Well, originally I wrote a TDB replacement, with a compatibility ABI
which would allow a seamless transition.

But then it was decided that we didn't want two TDB codebases, so I took
all that out and SAMBA would use its own, existing db_wrap API to do the
transition.

Except the db_wrap API didn't cover many databases, didn't cover all
cases and had ctdb-specific parts to it.  So now my task was to rewrite
SAMBA, including many old parts untouched for years, to make it use
db_wrap so it could later use ntdb.  Some of that has been done, but
much remains.

Meanwhile, there's no demand to drive it.  TDB has problems, but scaling
over 3GB isn't the main one.  The locking speed has been greatly
improved by the addition of inline mutexes; and so you won't notice
freelist contention as much.  And using dbwrap means the new API doesn't
even make the code cleaner.

ntdb may still have a useful role in green-fields projects which can
take advantage of the new API (eg. talloc-compatiblity).  But it's
increasingly obvious that SAMBA doesn't need it today.

Cheers,
Rusty.