Technical information about Domino/Notes

[fishkake]

Hey people,

Does anybody know where I can find some decent technical information about how Domino works? How the database structure works, how and why its different to regular relational databases, that sort of thing? I'm doing a final year project at university in Notes, and I need some background, but I've had trouble on notes.net and such...

 

[pmonett]

Notes is not a different Relational database engine, it is not relational at all. I think it is dangerous to put Notes and relational in the same sentence, at least until R7 goes gold with its DB2 structure.
As for its internal structure, I don't think you'll find much information on that. Way back during the Developers Conference for R4.6, I got the chance to ask a question about field sizes and forcasting db size growth. I was sorely disappointed by the result.
My question was simple : on a form with three fields, one date, one text and one RichText, given that I knew that no more than 50Kb of data would be saved in any given document, how long would it take to reach the (at the time) 2Gb limit for Notes dbs. The answer first came in the form of the obvious cop-out : "it depends on the size of the attachment". Once I pointed out that there would be no attachments, the discussion turned into a high-wire act where the Lotus guys tried as much as they could to appear like they were giving a valid answer without doing so, while I waited for them to tell me the descriptor size of a RichText field.
You see, it would appear that the company designing Notes (IRIS Associates) was being "subcontracted" at the time. This is before IBM bought Lotus, so I don't know how this situation is today, although I have heard of nothing that would incite me to think it has changed. Anyway, the guys from Lotus were totally incapable of telling me the size parameters of any given field type (i.e. : rich text). After a short discussion, it appeared that Iris did not make such data public, so no one was authorized to give me a good answer.
If such a simple question as "how many bytes define a RichText field" cannot recieve an answer at a Developer's Forum, I doubt that you'll get important information about the internal structure of a Notes db at all.
That said, I wish you good luck.

Pascal.