While I, personally, prefer the RDBMS approach myself, and continouusly find new amazing ways of doing things when SQL is your only tool, a forum could be implemented as a flat file system, with top posts being directories and replies being files in that directory (and the top post content being a special file in the post directory). That way, the structure is immediately visible and can easily be manipulated through the standard OS tools, but searching becomes unwieldly.

It also has the advantage of being a low-tech approach, where you don't need a database server. Concurrency becomes a problem, but as long as you prohibit editing of posts, you can avoid that problem.

In reply to Re: Help, RDBMS have taken over my brain! by Corion
in thread Help, RDBMS have taken over my brain! by BUU

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.