[Xastir] Looking for serial->IP widget

[James Jefferson]

> 2) Create an SQL database that's fed by the I/O daemon.

I've been running aprsworld.net for over it year. It collects approximately a 
million packets a day, parses them, and inserts them into the appropriate 
table(s). It works, I'm serving thousands of visitors a month that data. But 
it is *VERY* IO and CPU intensive. SQL databases are general purpose and 
cannot easily be optomized for the demands that Xastir would place on it.

For short term storage the database works great, mainly because everything is 
in memory. I have tables of the last position, weather, and telemetry of all 
stations. They are small and work well. But the big tables with all of the 
positions for all stations become a nightmare. They are really hard on the IO 
sub-system and a complete mess when they get corrupted.

I brought this up last time we talked about using a SQL database backend.  So 
once again I urge serious consideration and prototyping before basing Xastir 
on a relational database. Properly designed and coded datastructures are 
always going to be faster.

FWIW I am in the process of moving the weather and position tables to being 
filesystem based rather then RDMS based. I'll report on that to this list 
once I have some performance comparisons.

-Jim KB0THN