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Subject: Permaculture Database

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  • From: Matthew Shultz <deepwinter@winterroot.net>
  • To: Permaculture Database <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcdb] And another year
  • Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 15:53:16 -0800

Hey Jedd,
It might be interesting to get on the phone sometime. What time zone are you
in?

Key-Value store is bad in a lot of ways for querying, I agree. But what i'm
suggesting in some ways is a 2 phase approach. A key-value store is great
for letting people log a ton of data, all kinds of data that we might not
even have to know they would have beforehand (and it's very hard to think out
a normalized schema when we're talking literally hundreds of possible
parameters). However later on, when there is data available, it's
straightforward to transform elements of a key-value store into properly
normalized tables and load them into a RDBMS for querying. My thought is
that a key value store is perfect for sort of a shared log book, and then the
keys that get used be organized down the road for pattern search. Get my
gist? I can send along some sketches of how I'm thinking a simple interface
would work for this.

m.

On Feb 19, 2011, at 3:33 PM, jedd wrote:

> 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.
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