On Nov 22, 2014 5:53 PM, Paul <paulsteyn1@afrihost.co.za> wrote:
I don't want to try and tell you your business, but I had a few
thoughts on your mail:
No problems. You have some very good feedback which I appreciate and I couldn't say much because I
only had the roughest of conversations with this client. It's still not fully fleshed out but,
there is more political issues than technical.
On Mon, 17 Nov 2014 09:18:43 -0500
Eric <esj@esjworks.com> wrote:
On 11/16/2014 5:16 PM, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
Do you have use cases?
I'm preping to talk to a real estate title authority. they have
60+years of title info in the area and it is all held in informix.
That's a lot of data. And Informix is a real workhorse of a database.
Arbitrarily shifting to MongoDB and Base just doesn't sound like a well
though out decision...
It was more exploratory thought. Informix is an extremely expensive database, IBM stripped out
essential functionality and the current database is running on RedHat 5 and poorly maintained.
Informix is similarly old and they will not upgrade. Its been reported that the cost of the
Informix database plus any number of third party report writers would cost them 10 years of revenue.
I have a lot more conversations to go before I can validate their financial assessments of the
conversion.
Base doesn't strike me as a rock solid, "serious" solution, but that
might be just my perception.
Probably is it. I was trying to explore options for two reasons. I should have been clear about
separating out the two.
However, there are a few more pointers in
your mail that suggest the decision may be less than considered:
they generate reports on the fly (hence base) and would like to be
What exactly do you mean by this? That they regularly want custom
designed reports? Sounds odd. Surely they must have some idea of what
they want to get out of the system on a regular basis? Otherwise it
implies that they don't really know what they want the system for. And
that right there would be a fundamental problem, one that no amount of
engineering will solve.
That solution is unfortunately locked up in political challenges that will not be resolved until 1
of the lawyers retires. But from what I've seen, there is a significant need for flexibility in
report generation. How much is a real can't be revealed until they let me understand more about how
they do their work.
able to add information on properties incrementally without always
rewriting the schema and go through the database conversion.
A common request, but almost always a bad idea. By "adding information"
you must mean adding fields to the database, which should always be a
carefully considered decision, not an "as the mood strikes" decision.
Given the nature the information and their standing as a title authority, I can assure you that the
rate of change for record editions is very slow and considered.
Assuming that such fields are purely additional data, and in no way
form part of any relationships, then sure, they can be added quite
easily, but the question is always who is going to go through all the
current entries in the database filling in that new field? One can make
the new fields nullable, and just let all old data have nulls for those
new fields, but that just leaves a mess of incomplete data in the
database. If they've been collecting data for the past 60+ years, they
must have a pretty good idea of what data they need. Real estate data
can't change that often.
From what I can gather, you're mostly right. The primary change is our building together more
detailed information about properties that we had in the past and do it more accurately. I think
they're also changing legal requirements on titles with regards to title searches and their
validity. Fortunately, those changes are very very slow.
Yes, there may some legal reasons why they can't do this but htat is
why er are talking.
Legal reasons? I can't think of any. This is their data, they can do
what they like with it, I should think. But I'm a technical guy, not a
legal guy, so I really have little idea. All I *can* tell you is that
from a technical standpoint this sounds like a nightmare waiting to
bite you in the posterior later. And the fact that you think there may
be legal issues may indicate a misunderstanding about what it is the
client is trying to do.
When it comes to this kind of information, there are all sorts of weird legal quirks built up as a
result of hundreds of years of additive legal precedent. I know enough about their world there to
consider walking away from this contract because of the internal bickering. , I probably just
described the best reason for walking away. :-)
personally, I am an order of magnitude more effective with mongo than
any sql database. mongo maps better to my mind than sql. I'd like a
base connection so I can be more effective in my ad-hoc db tools
At a fundamental level, it sounds like the problem is with the concept,
not the implementation. I'd go back to the drawing board on this one.
Rethink what your client wants to do, and from there use proper tools
to implement it. Much as I am a fan of LO, I just can't recommend Base
as a tool for serious work in the order of 60+ years of data in an
Informix database.
I'm in the process of figuring out what they really want instead of what they tell me what to do.
But when it comes down to it, the most common complaint I hear is that it just cost too damn much
and they feel a bit ripped off by IBM.
Between license fees and the lost report writing capability that can not be replaced with third
party, they are feeling kind of burned and between a rock and a hard place.
But then again, you know what the client wants, I don't. And as you're
the one who has to do the work, you will need to decide how closely you
want to stick with what you're familiar with. And one assumes you're
the guy who has to live with the decisions. So if you want MongoDB and
Base, I'm sure someone will be able to point you in the right
direction. Unfortunately I can't, as I have no experience with MongoDB.
Remember, using MongoDB and base are two separate decisions. I was trying to close out the matrix
and see if I could use beast to replace the report and data entry tools now lost to Informix.
I just thought I'd point out what seems like a mess. You might well
have thought it through thoroughly, and this advice may be unwarranted
and unwanted, and if so I apologise, but I felt it better to offer
caution than to let you step blindly into harm's way.
It's entirely your call of course, but, given that I've done these
sorts of systems for a living for quite a few years, your description
raised warnings when parsed through my experience filter, and I felt I
should tell you about it.
No problem, I appreciate the input. Unfortunately, my experience with SQL over the past 30 years
has taught me to stay away from SQL as far as absolutely possible. I know most of my problems with
SQL come from an impedance mismatch between how I solve problems and how it wants to express
solutions. Usually, the group of people I work with leave the database to the very last and
isolated. We do that so the rest of the application is not contaminated by SQL isms and we have a
nailed down definition of the schema. We don't have hard numbers yet but with MongoDB, we are not
getting any of the chaos and heartache that SQL delivers on a regular basis.
I really do wish I SQL would go the way of COBOL.
--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Context
- Re: [libreoffice-users] mongodb and base · Eric S. Johansson
Privacy Policy |
Impressum (Legal Info) |
Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified, all text and images
on this website are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is
licensed under the Mozilla Public License (
MPLv2).
"LibreOffice" and "The Document Foundation" are
registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are
in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective
logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use
thereof is explained in our
trademark policy.