[mb-devel] ThingDB from The Open Library

[Simon Reinhardt]

Robert Kaye wrote:
> 
> On Jul 17, 2007, at 6:02 AM, Peter Brooks wrote:
>> I'm starting to find a lot of wiki's aren't aging very well.
> 
> And its for this exact reason that I worry about jumping on new tech. 
> The idea of a relational database has been around and proven for quite 
> some time and the postgres team is working very hard to make the DB 
> better with each release. I worry about relying on data store technology 
> that hasn't been proven.
> 
> Granted, we could probably save ourselves a lot of work not having to 
> shoehorn things to a relational database, but having a rock solid 
> database makes me sleep good at night.

ThingDB is not a new data store technology though, it's a schema for relational databases that allows to store semi-structured data in a relational database. And actually they're using Postgres for it.
I think the idea is quite interesting (they have some more interesting ideas there, worth checking out) and it might be useful for many other similar projects, a movie database for example. Or Wiktionary could really need that. But I think MB works fine with a fixed database structure for now since a lot of thought and energy was put into it. They could even learn from MB since they seem to have similar problems - see the paragraph about OLNs on http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/lib for example.

Simon (Shepard)