[Koha-zebra] A few Zebra Questions

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 03:55:10PM -0500, Sebastian Hammer wrote:
> >Is there any foreseeable way to get around the speed issues with 
> >updating that would make it feasible to store status data quickly?
> >For instance, Chris wondered if we could delay the actual indexing
> >process, but get the data in there for when the record is actually
> >retrieved (then index in batch say every minute or so)?
> >
> There are lots of ways to work around that I am sure.. different 
> complexities, different challenges, but I don't think any unsurmountable 
> problems. I have to be careful not to entirely drop my programmer's hat 
> in favor of my marketing hat, but really, it is primarily a matter of time.
> 
> What is the issue here -- the ability to use circulation status as a 
> filter in bibliographic searching, or what?
Ideally yes, but initially, we're thinking we just need to avoid grabbing
data from more than one place when we want to display it. If status can be
updated in real-time in Zebra then we can rely on the MARC records entirely
for display purposes. Otherwise, we need to grab status info from mysql 
every time we do a search. This would also mean that external Z3950 queries
on the data wouldn't have up-to-date status information. Unfortunately, 
having real-time status info for every item is a core part of the way
that libraries do business, so we can't really batch it.

So I'm not too sure how Zebra handles updates, but for statuses we don't
really need the index to know about them, we just need the status to
be in sync with the actual status of the item when the item's record 
is retrieved for display. So is there a way to update without re-indexing, 
and is that faster? Does that make sense? :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
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