pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Richard Morris writes:
 > Theres a nice discussion on slashdot about the advantages and 
 > disadvantages of relational and object (XML) databases.
 > http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/10/2043202
 > 
 > The first comment:
 > 
 >  >  The thing the XML databases are nice for is if folks can't really 
 > lock down the schema.

Also for comic relief note child of parent post:

  Proverb (Score:4, Funny)
  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 12, @10:25PM (#11923876)
 
  I once had a problem.
  I thought: "Oh, I know: I'll just use XML!"

  Now I had two problems.

I recommend reading all of the 4+ rated comments.  Lots of good stuff
and still a very controversial topic.  IMO, I don't think that XML is
exclusive to object or relational databases, but rather a bridge
mechanism between the two.

 > Seems to sum it up for me.
 > 
 > Can we lock down the schema, do we want to? By this I mean do we want a 
 > fixed set of fields for tha plant data. If we do this it kind of locks 
 > down the database and the type of info which people can add, creating an 
 > inflexiable system.

No, I don't think it is really a good idea to stop being open to ideas
about what sorts of information is important to have about plants and
other elements in the database.  Nor do I think that the current
schema is optimal and it has a way to go before being "fully
normalized".  I do see a point where the schema matures in the sense
that we really don't change it much, but at this point I don't think
what we have still needs a lot of work.

 > When new data such as the tanplants data comes along it could be a big 
 > job to adapt a relational model to fit.
 > 
 > Apoligies for revisiting old ground.
 > 
 > Rich
 > 
 > _______________________________________________
 > pcplantdb mailing list
 > pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
 > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/pcplantdb

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'