On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, rob caSSon wrote:

pat,

one other thing....on the linuxtoday site, there was a reply to my post suggesting the use of a multivalue database as the basis for a library catalog....have you any experience with these?

Yeah, they're talking about PICK or derivatives. Many of the available ILS are written in some form of PICK, including Dynix (where I worked ~10 years ago).

don't think it would be sensible/feasible to redo koha to use this kind of technology, but an interesting idea nonetheless....i've spent some time looking at documentation/examples, and looks conceptually similar to marc right out of the box....

It is. PICK was developed to support the US Army MILPERCEN folks. The official army cataloging tool is very MARC-like, so I'm sure that's why many commercial vendors use it. You're right though. Koha is really too far along to try and rewrite using a new flavor of DBMS, especially one as far removed from RDMS which we all know fairly well.

an opensource (LGPL'd) product is available here, and is still under development (isn't everything ;):

http://www.maverick-dbms.org/

Wow ... that's almost as twisted as GNU Cobol. ;)

anyway, just thought i'd pass on some interesting info,

thanks, I'll CC the koha-devel list on this reply. -pate

rob

Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager migrant Linux sys admin the Koha project ruby, shell, and perl geek http://www.koha.org http://pate.eylerfamily.org