Alfresco content management repository

[dwichman]

Perhaps a dumb question, but I couldn't find any specific documentation on this.  It appears, to me, that Alfresco is storing content on the filesystem in an alfresco directory.

If so, what are the plans for supporting a repository that is based on a database, or some other cluster-compatable environment?

What application data is currently stored in the database?

[davidc]

There are three seperate but integrated storage areas:
- content store  (file system)
- meta-data  (database)
- index (lucene - file system)

A core set of Alfresco services (known as the NodeService & ContentService, plus some others) are responsible for storage read and write and also provide transactional support across all three storage areas.  We've put considerable effort into ensuring that data is safe (Spring's transactional support has helped here).

We don't have concrete plans for supporting an all database storage scheme, however, it is possible to plug-in a different implementation of the above services.  There are some capabilities such as random access which are not so easy to implement with a db.

We do have plans for cluster-compatible environments.