On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:

Hi Pat,

sorry to take a while to get back. I've been marshalling my thoughts somewhat (I'd asked Brian for a contact e-addy and wasn't quite expecting him to forward my details to you, not that I'm unhappy he did...).

Actually, I asked him for your email address when he said that you were trying to get in touch with me.

Were Dynix a Pick licencee? The name sounds familiar, but I'm not sure whether that's why. I'm pleased to know you know MV - shame you don't seem such a fanatic as me :-)

Dynix used Unidata (at least while I was there, I'd assume that they're now UniVerse users).

"Custom database". Where I saw it - in your FAQ, namely "What record formats does Koha support?".

Hmm, that's not terribly clear (although it's aimed at librarians, not developers). It would better read, "We're currently using a custom database schema to organize our records in a MySQL database.", or something like that.

Which is why I thought Pick might be an excellent fit for Koha - seeing as a library database is heavily text oriented, and Pick is 100% text based ... :-) Looking at the MARC layout, it seems an even better fit. Obviously, seeing as you know MV, you'll know what I'm getting at, but I'd store one MARC record per Pick record. Together with hefty indexing, I'd expect that to blow MySQL out of the water for speed of retrieval. Unfortunately, what with the speed of disks and the amount of RAM modern computers have, being 500% faster probably doesn't count for much :-(

I know the biggest impediment to switching to an underlying MV database is "it's different", and I well understand your concerns, but surely it can't be that hard... :-) bearing in mind so many Pick sites have users writing very functional code ... :-) although I heartily concur with you wanting programmers to keep in control of things! I've cleaned up too many messes in my time created by people who didn't understand the basics :-( Oh well, that's life.

By the way, MaVerick will sit on top of MySQL - when we get a working TCL in place (it might well be here by now) we should be able to define DICTs and read Koha files directly in MaVerick ... so it might well be possible to make the back ends interchangeable. But to argue that using MaVerick would make a massive speed difference on a 16Mb 486 wouldn't cut much ice, even though it's true :-)

I'll look at oss4lib and see what's there, and I'll hunt up my code. But if you want to pick up some interesting stuff on how Pick does (and MaVerick will) handle fast native text retrieval, go to www.oliver.com, into mailing lists, files, and look at a couple of papers that are there. One is called "Litwin", I think, and the other is called dynamic_hash_coding.

Well, you keep working on MaVerick, we'll keep working on Koha, and maybe at some point things will merit another look. In the meantime, do get involved with OSS4Lib, it's a good list and, who knows, you might end up convincing a few people that MV is in fact the way to go. BTW, I'm CC:ing the koha-devel list just so that the discussion can hit a few more eyes and ears. -pate

Cheers, Wol

-----Original Message----- From: Pat Eyler [mailto:pate@eylerfamily.org] Sent: 08 September 2002 00:55 To: Anthony W. Youngman Subject: Re: Koha

On Sat, 7 Sep 2002, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:

...

In message <Pine.LNX.4.44.0209052116510.1556-100000@petrol.whirlycott.co m>, Pat Eyler <pate@eylerfamily.org> writes

...

Anthony, Brian Profitt said that I should drop you a line about Koha. He mentioned that you had some ideas that could benefit the project. What's on your mind?

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