Stefano wrote:
While the question that you should be asking yourself is: what does the data look like? how stuctured is it?
From where I stand, the gump metadata is highly structured and can be perfectly mapped in to a relational structure with reasonable effort. Also, given its structure, can be indexed precisely and thus queried very efficiently.
So the fact that I can visualize this it into a huge rats nest in my head (especially when wired into objects) doesn't help me make a case for it being unstructured? ;-) ;-)
Ok, I hear you -- and stepping back, looking at the main (named) entities as entries in tables, I can see a relational schema with relationships as names with or without RI. What I can't see (though) is what helps me with the time aspect --- i.e. when a dependency is dropped, what do I compare against?
nonono wait a second. What are you talking about? I was talking about putting the historical data into the system, not the gump metadata.
I guess the data I'm interested in right now is (somehow) relationships over time. One projects relationship to it's repository, to it's peers, to communities (of users). How that looks, I'm not sure, but I'll try to answer that in my head before I continue.
I have an email in my draft folder about how we can do perfect nagging with gump... but I need to understand the graph complexity before I can go on and I don't have much time ATM since we are delivering the first demo of our project next week.
At that point, once you have the data in the database, you can start thinking about what to do with it. Dependency graph visualization, history of dependencies, FoG estimation, all of these are problems that will result in particular queries and particular use of the result set.
I like XML as the human (community) editable interface, and converting it to
relational for each run really doesn't appeal to me.
Of course!! Nonono, I don't want to move from XML descriptors to relational data, that would be stupid without an GUI or a webapp to guide people, but I wouldn't use it anyway.
Even if I do, comparing as I load, and detecting changes -- also sounds like work. It also sounds similar to the XML to Object work that Gumpy is doing, and I was hoping something could help out here w/o me doing it myself in pedestrian steps.
I am *NOT* proposing to change the way gump loads metadata but the way gump stores history information
I need to do more thinking, but thanks for the direct feedback, I appreciate that. Another persons clarity helps.
BTW: So say we want MySQL [for results and maybe more], how do we set that up? Do we install, or leverage an existing MySQL install at Apache?
good question, but too early now, let's focus on what we want to do and how, the infrastructural details will come after that.
-- Stefano.
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