Charles,
> ".....is perhaps evolving its schema _more_ now that sequencing is
> finished and annotation is really picking up speed, you should not
> think that
> the changes are going to get less ! You will have to deal with
> problems like
> genes that get renamed but you still need the old name around, how to
> cross
> reference oligos to many parts of sequence, how to organise RNAi data
> that may
> end up matching multiple chromosomes etc. etc. I don't want to put
> you off, but
> as far as I aware, constantly evolving schema is not one of
> relational databases
> strengths."
All of the above issues are easily solvable by a SQL expert. "You
show me somebody preaching about the 'limitations' of relational
databases, and I'll show you somebody with a poor knowledge of the SQL
standard, or who is using an inferior SQL RDBMS."
> Their solution is to maintain a mixed system of acedb and a
> relational
> db: where the working dbs are all acedb and the web site is a mixture
> of
> an acedb server and a relational relational db. The data in the
> mysql
> database is directly derived from the acedb reference database.
>
> Any thoughts?
Hey, if it works for them. Apparently they have an AceDB expert on
staff, but no SQL expert on staff. Greater technology decisions than
the above have been made on that basis -- you have to work with the
staff you have. Just don't let them justify their *pragmatic*
technology decision with a bunch of theoretical BS.
Now, for the soapbox. (YMMV):
I've looked into OODBMS for my business. However, I've kept from
using any in production for one simple reason: lack of a standard.There is no international standard for OODBMS,
meaningthat each
OODBMS is its own animal and databases are not at all portable between
different software packages. Nor is your knowledge of one OODBMS even
20% tranferrable to another.
In comparison to relational databases, this is like turning the clock
back to 1980, when every database implementation was idiosyncratic and
using two database systems in the same enterprise was darn near
impossible. While modern programming languages make this easier through
middeware than it was then, it's still not a desirable situation.
I'll check on the progress of OODBMS in another couple of years. Who
knows, ANSI might codify OODB-UML as a standard, and then we'll have
something to build on. But until then ... the RDBMS model has been
around for 32 years, and the SQL standard for 20, and that a lot of
accumulated wisdom to throw away casually.
-Josh Berkus