Proposal: Encouraging DB-using applications

[Don Sanders]

On Sunday 21 September 2003 19:08, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> On Sunday 21 September 2003 10:11, Roberto Alsina wrote:
> > Examples of applications where a DB makes sense:
> >
> > Recipe app (KRecipes)
> > Mail/News client (why not?, it makes "search folders" way
> > simpler)

DB storage would have to be strictly optional, so features like search 
folders should be made available to users that elect not to use a DB, 
hence none of the current search folder code would be made obsolete 
by DB support.

> > CD/Book/Whatever catalog 
> > Notetaking applications (KJots, KNotes)
> > RSS aggregator (try handling 300 feeds in a flat file :-)
>
> And here we disagree. None of these apps would benefit from using a
> DB, and all are the perfect example of using a tool way too
> powerful and complex for the job. Email has the additional
> requirement that it *must* be in a format easy to recover.

Personally I find the idea of experimenting with storing mail/contacts 
in a SQL accessible database attractive because this would allow 3rd 
parties to use a widely accepted language (SQL) for accessing 
organizational data stored in KDE.

I think it would be nice to have a uniform language/interface for 
accessing KDE data, and I would like something with more explicit 
structured than text files and something more optimizable than xml.

I'm also interested in storage technologies that can answer queries of 
the following type efficiently:
Give me the number of items that match this expression.
Give me the i'th item from the set of items that match this expression 
sorting by this field.

I think such a technology would be useful for Mail and Addressees. I'm 
not convinced a DB is the right technology due to the overhead for 
transaction processing, and concurrent access.

These are just my thoughts/experiences, I don't mean to strongly 
advocate for or against using a database.

Don.