bind-dlz

[Graeme Fowler]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 15:02 -0500, Joshua Smith wrote:
> I guess I'm a little out of the loop, but the first thing I've heard
> about bind-dlz was from the thread by gnello.dsouza at gmail.com,
> entitled bind-dlz testing.  I am curious to know what the possible
> advantages of storing your zone data in a mysql database are?  It just
> seems like a source of additional over head and complexity to me.

I used an older version of DLZ to build a multiple-frontend high
availability database-backended DNS system for a large domain registrar
providing authoritative (apparently!) services for something in excess
of a million domains.

When we got to approx 550,000 "normal" domains - in zone files - we hit
several problems, not least of which was the fact that even on
high-powered hardware BIND took somewhere in the region of 20 hours to
start up. With DLZ this became a matter of seconds, and changes in zones
were reflected instantly instead of waiting for a zone reload.

Yes, there was additional overhead and complexity but the flexibility
and improvement in service brought about by making a DB do the work
instead of BIND was well worth it.

Graeme