[om-list] Re: Spiritual Action [and a database thought]

[Lee Howard]

At 05:14 PM 3/24/01 -0700, Luke Call wrote:
>Delightful reading, Mark.
>
>BTW, sometime it might be good to have a postgresql installation or 
>something equivalent that we can start coding against. I pick that one 
>because it's a decent free relational database with room to grow into. 
>Our metamodel could map to it easily, but we could change to some other 
>DB type if/when we want/need something different. Maybe sometime I can 
>start reading up on it unless someone knows it already.

I already do a fair amount of work using MySQL databases, have a few of
them running, and am currently migrating our company database over to it
with a PHP-Apache interface.  My experience is with MySQL, but
learning/implementing PostgreSQL shouldn't be difficult, although the two
have some distinct differences in both the advantage and disadvantage
categories... namely, PostreSQL is slow in comparison to MySQL, where MySQL
lacks regression (is that the word?) functions that PostgreSQL has, and
MySQL suffers from growing pains more - in that it probably has a more
active development team, and a customer base growing faster than
PostgreSQL's, but consequently is more frequent to feature bugs.  I haven't
ever needed regression functions and believe that MySQL's bugginess is
simply relative to its growth - more people noticing things as more people
use it.

Anyway, I can help put one in place, if needed.

>I'm wondering if it might be good to make the model shared to start with 
>for all of us, so we can see what the others do and learn/benefit from 
>each others' work. So a shared server in connection with a web server 
>where we can dump software, would be a good thing, seems to me.
>
>Disagreements? Suggestions, or other thoughts?

Agreement on my part.  Yet... I remember suggesting similar things year(s)
ago, "can I at least get some data?".  I remember suggesting that we use my
dorky MW.EXE program to "just get started", and that we'd migrate the data
over later when we had something to migrate towards.  We did discuss MySQL
very briefly at that one actual meeting, when it became somewhat apparent
that the data structure - the actual way in which the information is
stored, is extremely relevant to the entire project, and that models had to
be made before that could be done.

I'm not sure what the status is still on this.

Lee.