[Biojava-l] BioSQL observations

[Matthew Pocock]

> This is a really rather tricky to do properly.   I think where you always
> end up with this kind of thing is needing versioning not only for objects,
> but also for "open containment" groups of related objects e.g.
collections.
>
> If this is the kind of thing you want to do, it may be worth looking at
> WebDAV, and the development work going on in the IETG Delta-V Working
> Group.  See http://www.webdav.org/deltav/
>
> It might give you some ideas, at the very least.
>
> In regards of performance, I'd say the motto "first make it work, then
make
> it fast" might apply.  Versioning over objects and advanced collections is
> ******** hard!
>
> S.

As I read the webdav stuff, I'm reminded of the transaction control book I
read (several thousand pages on transactions, commit/rollback, atomicity and
finite state machines). Of course you're right. To do this correctly for all
use-cases is a very hard task. Perhaps our use-cases need stating explicitly
so that we at least know wether people need/require full versioning and
transactional control or just want to do single-history
commit/lock/up-to-date checks. This was why I like the idea of stating all
of this in meta-data rather than code or schema. It's possible (and perhaps
desirable) to put all the versioning logic/data seperate to the data model.

And then of course everyone seems to use meta-data to mean something
different...

M