Overview Database

Also known as: overview, OVER database

A per-group index holding a few fields from each article: subject, author, date, Message-ID, References, byte count, and line count. Servers maintain it so clients can list a group without fetching whole articles, which is what makes opening a group of millions of posts practical at all. The XOVER and OVER commands read it, and bulk header downloading in binary readers is overview retrieval at scale.

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