At first glance: brilliant! I was about to implement this key/value thing with an XML type... I will take a closer look at this, thanks a lot, Oleg! Tips & tricks to get this going in PostgreSQL?
Rob 2009/9/28 Oleg Bartunov <o...@sai.msu.su> > Have you considered contrib/hstore to build flexible database scheme ? > > Oleg > > On Sun, 27 Sep 2009, InterRob wrote: > > Dear David, dear Peter, dear all, >> Peter, I was happy reading your reply right after I opened and read >> Davids. >> I do think I am on the right track; it is not a matter of building the >> one-and-only right schema, not in this case. Archaeology has the same >> twist >> as has ethnography, antropology and alike: they work with (what I would >> call) "narratives" (in fact, in the case of archaeology this seems to me >> to >> be an archaeologists monologue...). They try to support their findings >> with >> statistics and other means of quatification -- as does this modern, >> rationalist world require them to do, to be taken seriously as science... >> I >> seek to implement all this in a hybrid form; a fusion between the >> relational >> and EAV concept. >> >> Peter, may I invite you to privately share some more details on the system >> you are using and the design of it? Did you implement it using PostgreSQL? >> Looking forward to your reply. >> (And with respect to your previous message: whom are you actually >> referring >> to by the acronym "OPs"?) >> >> Cheerz, >> >> >> Rob >> >> 2009/9/27 Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsber...@gmail.com> >> >> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 2:22 PM, David Fetter <da...@fetter.org> wrote: >>> >>>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 08:26:27PM +0200, InterRob wrote: >>>> >>>>> Dear David, dear all, >>>>> I very well understand what you are saying... >>>>> >>>> >>>> Clearly you do not. What you are proposing has been tried many, many >>>> times before, and universally fails. >>>> >>> >>> I've been refraining from jumping on this due to time constraints, but >>> this statement is silly. We have a system that does almost exactly >>> what the OP wants although the implementation is slightly different: >>> we use an EAV like model with strong typing and build set / subset >>> forests to maintain arbitrary hierarchies of relationships. Our >>> reasons for doing this are similar to the OPs; it's for research (in >>> our case medical research). We maintain over 200,000 pieces of end >>> user generated metadata, describing what would be in a conventional >>> relational model over 20,000 columns and some 1,000s of tables but the >>> actual physical model is some 40 tables. Yes, the flip side is, such >>> a system won't support more than 1,000,000s of transactions per day, >>> but that's not why you build them. >>> >>> >>>> That your people are failing to get together and agree to a data model >>>> is not a reason for you to prop up their failure with a technological >>>> "fix" that you know from the outset can't be made to work. >>>> >>>> >>> Spoken like someone who has always had the luxury of working in areas >>> with well defined problem domains... I can't tell you the number of >>> people that told us exactly the same thing when we started on it. >>> That was 8 years ago. Not only can such systems be built, they can be >>> made to scale reasonably well. You do need to understand what you are >>> doing and why: the costs can be high, but when it comes to research, >>> the benefits can far outweigh the costs. >>> >>> -- >>> Peter Hunsberger >>> >>> >>> >> > Regards, > Oleg > _____________________________________________________________ > Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru), > Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia > Internet: o...@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/ > phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83 > >
