"Jaap" == Jaap Akkerhuis <jaap@NLnetLabs.nl> writes:
Jaap> The drawback of using a direct database back-end is that Jaap> this means that are close ties between the nameserver and Jaap> the database. If one of the two fails, you have a problem. Indeed. The database back-end becomes a SPoF. To some extent that can be mitigated by the fancy high-availability replication techniques that the likes of Oracle & Sybase offer. For a fancy price of course. Since SPoFs in the DNS are bad, I would hope important zones ran on homogeneous DNS implementations with identical hardware, OS and system administration. So if a TLD did use a name server with a database back-end, I hope they'd couple that with something like dynamic updates to a DNS hosting provider that ran a different implementation. And maybe did anycasting as well. I compare loading Gb-sized text zone files to teaching an elephant to ballet dance. It can be made to work if sufficient energy is expended though the results are not pretty.