[Clipart] installing dms

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 01:30:35AM -0400, Greg Steffensen wrote:
>  I've still not succeeded installing DMS, but part of the reason is that I 
> have very little experience with perl. Bryce is helping me out, I'm sure 
> I'll get it worked out in the next few days. Regarding this sql based DMS, 
> it works. Until ocal aquires several gigs of data, I'd suspect that you'll 
> get better performance by storing the content in an sql database that keeps 
> everything in a single file, like sqlite or mysql, as opposed to using the 
> filesystem.

Greg, please don't think that I haven't already considered this.  In
fact, I have already built and deployed a SQL-based document management
system once before:

    http://docsys.sourceforge.net/

I've done a number of LAMP projects in the past; I did not choose to do
it this way out of ignorance.  ;-)

Using a SQL database does make it convenient to get something hacked
together relatively quickly.  However, the experience with SQL-based
systems was that they lead to a great deal of administrative difficulty
when you need to do things beyond the basics.

Also, I would strongly caution you against storage of binary data in the
database.  Yes, it can be done, and yes it usually works okay.  However,
having binary data (or even large chunks of plain text) in the db makes
it more cumbersome to administrate the database.  Also, database
corruption can become an issue.  There are also performance hits from
pulling files from a database rather than a file system when browsing.

> that shouldn't be too hard to add. Even if DMS is still the way you want to 
> go, we may be able to use something like this for indexing to help with 
> search performance.

Yeah, we need to stick with DMS.  I appreciate your enthusiasm to do all
this, and you definitely have interesting ideas, but I think you're
going to want to be focusing more on the Inkscape side; this is an
Inkscape SoC project after all.  ;-)  Despite it's incompleteness, DMS
is where we've been planning to go.  I think we could absorb one or two
architectural changes for DMS, but a rewrite with radically different
technologies and designs would be too risky.

I think that changing to XML-RPC / REST, and adding a read-only SQL
database for improving search performance would be okay, but
want to keep it in Perl and keep it filesystem based.

Bryce