Hi all.
In short, I am working on a system that allows me to keep track of
changes to a large amount of short texts (a couple of thousand text
snippets, two or three sentences per text). All text is stored in a
database. As soon as a user changes some text (insert, delete,
update), this action is recorded. Look at an article on e.g. Wikipedia
and click "History". This is more or less what I am trying to
accomplish.
Right now, my "history" class that takes care of all changes, is
working pretty much as I want. The thing is that both the original
text and the altered text is stored in the database every time the
text is changed. My concern is that this will eventually evolve into a
serious problem regarding amount of storage and performance. So, I am
looking for a more efficient way to store all changes.
Ideas I have come up with so far are:
1) Store the "delta" (=the actual change) of a text change. This could
be done by utilizing the Pear package TextDiff. My idea was to compare
the old with the new text with help of the TextDiff class. I would
then grab the array containing the changes from TextDiff, serialize it
and store this data into the db. The problem is that this is every
thing else but efficient when it comes to smaller text (the serialized
array holding the changes was actually larger than the two texts
combined).
2) Do some kind of compression on the text to be stored. However, it
seems that the build-in compression functions from PHP5 are more
efficient when it comes to large texts.
Any other ideas?
thank you.
//frank
ps. I notice that Mediawiki also stores complete articles in the db
(every time an article is updated, the hole article is stored in the
database). ds.
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