Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

 Hi Matthew,

 I haven't been slack for some self-fulfilling prophecy here.  ;)

 I've been working - in my day job - with Cassandra, a massively
 scalable key-value store.  In the recently released v0.7.x
 branch, it can be a bit smarter with indexes, but it's still a long
 way from being anywhere near as useful (for what I want to do,
 or think I want to do) as a SQL-able RDBMS.

 I'm starting to look at SciDB - it has a pretty impressive set of
 goals, and an even more impressive progenitor driving it - but
 is some way off being ready for production I think.

 OTOH, the amount of data that I'm thinking about will, or at
 least the key set will, easily sit inside a reasonable amount of
 memory - so I'm in no hurry to find esoteric solutions for that
 aspect of my problems.  OTOOH I may well be grossly under-
 estimating the size of the problems that I may one day have.

 What is it they say?  Algorithms are for people who can't afford RAM.

 I'd love to know a bit more about this VSAS thing - can't find any
 obvious candidates on the intergoogles - but obdisclaimer here is
 that I'm hip with the basics, and only the basics, of OO.

 On the upside, I'm a big fan of CI, so the Kohana layout should be
 easy to accustom to.  What's the licence on your work?

 Sorry to hear about the iPhone app.  ;)   (Nokia N900 user here,
 though sadly my street cred has fallen through the floor since
 Nokia sidled up to Microsoft.)

 My gut feel, as ever, with statistics for the average permaculturist,
 the big problem will be getting enough raw data into the system in
 a useful format.  The second will be having a system free and
 designed and documented sufficiently to let (other) people do
 the really interesting statistical work.

 The permy list in oceania has, of late, become pretty depressing
 in terms of in-fighting and the generation of closed or exclusive
 systems.  I hope it's a blip.

 j.