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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] XML vrs relational

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] XML vrs relational
  • Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:31:43 +0000

Chad Knepp wrote:

Richard Morris writes:
> 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.

Indeed I very much agree with you here. This does raise a good technical chalange as to how we can build a system to cope with a changable schema. Looking forward to Chad's next release.

> When new data such as the tanplants data comes along it could be a big > job to adapt a relational model to fit.

Has anyone had a look at this tanplant data? I've not had feedback from anyone on this yet.

Rich





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