[Koha-devel] Using a Native XML Database with Koha

Tue Jun 2 17:16:16 CEST 2009

Developers,

A recent post in the Koha discussion list about MODS support reminded me
of something I'd be thinking of for a while.  I've heard of talk of
developing Koha to support other standards that MARC, such as DC, MODS
or METS.  It certainly would be nice to be able to use whichever schema
best fit ones collection, and to be able to mix different types of
standards together into a common interface and management system.  I
suppose one of the major difficulties would be finding a way to map all
those different standards to a relational database, without exploding
the number of tables and complexity.

So, the thought occurred to me: since most of these formats are already
in XML (or could be mapped to it easily enough), why not use a Native
XML Database?  This would save on mappings, since XQuery would be used
to extract information directly from the XML.  It would also be flexible
enough to allow for home-grown Schemas to be mixed in with standards.
There would also be one less translation in getting the information out
of storage and into an AJAX interface.

The one major concern I see (aside from all the re-coding) is speed.
Could a Native XML Database, with the proper indexes, perform as quickly
as Koha does now with MySQL and Zebra? And is there any way to answer
that without doing the re-coding?

I just thought I'd throw this out as food for thought, and hopefully
some discussion. I don't know if this has been mentioned before
(couldn't find it in the email archives), but it could prove to be worth
looking at.

Cheers,

Ian Walls

Systems Integration Librarian

NYU Health Sciences Libraries

(212) 263-8687

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