Perhaps a mistake to ask this here (heresy I suspect) but I would be interested in the perspectives of people who make a living at this.
Background: I am a molecular biologist trying to build a database containing genomic data, strain details, community info (people, publications etc....). Everything except the genomic data is currently housed in an object-oriented acedb database. In conversations with other groups who are going through the same transition we are someone stated that: ".....is perhaps evolving its schema _more_ now that sequencing is finished and annotation is really picking up speed, you should not think that the changes are going to get less ! You will have to deal with problems like genes that get renamed but you still need the old name around, how to cross reference oligos to many parts of sequence, how to organise RNAi data that may end up matching multiple chromosomes etc. etc. I don't want to put you off, but as far as I aware, constantly evolving schema is not one of relational databases strengths." Their solution is to maintain a mixed system of acedb and a relational db: where the working dbs are all acedb and the web site is a mixture of an acedb server and a relational relational db. The data in the mysql database is directly derived from the acedb reference database. Any thoughts? regards, Charles ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
