Given (for example) PostGreSQL, is there any reason why someone hasn't ported the algorithms of BIND on top of something like it? It seems to me that it ought to be possible to keep a nameserver running whilst one is doing maintenance on it...
the line of people who have asked for this would stretch out the door and into the street. bind runs from memory rather than from disk, because it has to be able to answer at wire speed for large values of "wire". we're working on a hierarchical storage system, basically a memory cache with LRU, backed by a database. we're also working on a way to load from sql databases into memory rather than always having to load from disk. it's likely that the second of those two projects will be complete a year or so before the first :-). in 8.1.2++, though, the goal is to be able to check and/or reload a zone without having to stat() all the others. for someone with 50K zones on board, this should be a huge speedup. -- Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com>