[BioPython] [OT] Revision control and databases

[Sean Davis]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio
<dalloliogm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a question (well, it's not directly related to biopython or pygr, but
> to scientific computing).
>
> I always used flat files to store results and data for my bioinformatics
> analys, but not (as I was saying in another thread) I would like to start
> using a database to do that.
>
> The problem is I don't know if databases do Revision Control.
> When I used flat files, I was used to save all the results in a git
> repository, and, everytime something was changed or calculated again, I did
> commit it.
> Do you know how to do this with databases? Does MySQL provide support for
> revision control?
> Thanks :)

No.  Relational databases just store data.  You could build such a
system, but that would require a fair amount of work.  I would suggest
storing metadata about your analyses in the database and storing the
actual results on the file system.

Sean