[Koha-devel] RFC for a really new stuff : sharing data worldwide

[David Cook]

"Multi-tenant" is certainly a vague term. Koha via Debian packages is already multi-tenant at the code level. Personally I don't know why someone would promote "multi-tenant" as something desirable in a lot of contexts, but I see that you're referring to it in the sense of sharing data. That's cool.

One of my first tasks at Prosentient, back when I was an intern, was to create a SQL report database that was shared amongst all our Koha customers. It was early in my programmer days, so it's rather awful, but I think it may have been useful for a time. Each different Koha database user had read access to a central database schema of reports, and they could clone those reports into their local Koha database. 

I think Chris Cormack, Liz Rea, and I were actually talking about the SQL Report Library on the wiki and how it's quite unwieldy... and Liz was saying how it would be great if you could upvote and downvote reports. I think that's something that you mention in your RFC (e.g. "good data" vs "bad data"). I think that's a great idea.

Vendors, serial (publishing) patterns... yeah I could see that being useful too. "Subscriptions" per se maybe not so much as those are specific to vendor-client contracts. 

But yeah I think overall it's a good idea. 

David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007


> -----Original Message-----
> From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-
> bounces at lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain
> Sent: Thursday, 21 January 2016 1:19 AM
> To: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> Subject: [Koha-devel] RFC for a really new stuff : sharing data worldwide
> 
> Ladies & gentlemen,
> 
> We're competing more and more against providers that promote a "cloud
> multi-tenant LMS".
> Koha is a cloud application (and it is since 2000, long before cloud is born).
> What does "multi-tenant" mean ? It mean that you'll get access to many
> resources that are shared worldwide.
> 
> I think that the "multi-tenancy" is a way for proprietary vendors to lock-in
> their customers [1]. But the idea of having a worldwide database for some
> informations is interesting and relevant. Proprietary vendors take care of
> updating this database. Open Source projects are not working centrally, so
> we must find another way of creating and maintaining such a database.
> 
> With this thing in mind, BibLibre has decided to sponsor an intern + some
> internal resources for next summer dedicated to a project dedicated to
> sharing data between koha instances worldwide.
> 
> I wrote a 1st draft of RFC and I'd like to have your feedback:
> http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/SharingDatasBetweenKohas_rfc
> 
> If this project is successful, in the automn version of Koha, we may see a way
> to share worlwide data between all Koha libraries !
> 
> [1] if you're a proprietary vendor and are reading this: I don't mean it's the
> only reason for multi-tenancy.
> 
> --
> Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
> BibLibre, Services en logiciels libres pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open
> Source software and services for libraries
> 
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