Re: GNOME DB's (Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8)

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 07:01, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> Bob Smith wrote:
> 
> > A few comments on the DB topic.
> > 
> > 1. It was commented that a DB's too heavy for things like egg-recent.
> > Alone, that might be true. But how many places could a database come in
> > handy? If used all over, it could provide great features, polish, and
> > speed up development time.
> 
> I agree; I think the question is how much of a RDBMS does the desktop 
> need.  Specifically, stored procedures are the main incompatible 
> sticking point between different databases; things like triggers and 
> notifications can (hopefully) be abstracted away by gnome-db.

They cant be abstracted away completely cause the triggers/notifications
use the same language as the stored procs. For an individual application
like Storage you could as I said earlier create pluggable backends for
various DBs for that app but of course it would be pointless and a waste
of effort to do that for all potential DB apps that need the more
powerful features of an RDBMS.


> What things would people like to do with a desktop database?  If the 
> goal is to move all the current apps' private databases into a global 
> desktop database, the requirements on the database itself are going to 
> be quite different than if it's just used for small bits of data (like 
> recently opened files).  For example, does rhythmbox start storing its 
> music collection information in the database with a common format that 
> muine can use as well?  Do you start putting, say, selected EXIF image 
> data into the database, that fSpot, Nautilus, the file-open dialog box, 
> etc. can all reference?  Does Evolution start storing address, email, 
> and todo items in the database?  Or is it only for "small" things, like 
> recently-used data, and maybe bookmarks?

Anything thats XML based could easily be used in the DB. For efficiency
the DB/Gnome-DB should allow the result sets of queries and stored procs
to be output in an XML format (rather than storing data in the DB as XML
which would be inefficient - MS SQL does this nicely cause you can
specify XML output/format in the query/stored proc). As an example the
xml help files for Yelp could be stored in the DB - you would get
powerful searchable access to all help topics via sql directly or
through storage get a natural language front end to the help system -
now that would be cool :) 

> 
> As far as the abstraction layer goes, it seems that Storage would be the 
> natural interface for applications that wish to access the desktop 
> database -- not gnome-db.  Thus, the burden of database support would 
> fall on Gnome Storage (which in turn could use gnome-db), and the 
> application writer can deal with a higher level interface.

If the gnome-db widgets could be modified to use Storage directly then
this could be an ideal/universal solution.

jamie.

> 
> Incidentally, if anyone is interested in what the WinFS solution to the 
> overall "desktop database" idea looks like, there is a bunch of 
> documentation starting at 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/WinFS/default.aspx
> .
> 
> 	- Vlad
> 
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> 
>