http:\/\/www.mysql.com\/documentation\/mysql\/bychapter\/manual_Reference.html#Column_types<\/a>) For numerical data, the bigint column type has a range of -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 or 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 unsigned, and the varchar type supports up to 255 characters.\u00a0 If you need more room than that, the longtext type supports up to 4,294,967,295 characters.\u00a0 War and Peace in ASCII from the Gutenberg project, is just over 3 million characters.\u00a0 How often do you need to store more than 1,000 copies of war and peace in one column of one record?\u00a0 Expensive commercial databases like Oracle no doubt have even more impressive figures.<\/p>\nThere are reasons why most of the largest web sites with the most traffic and largest amount of information use relational database backends, and not CSV files or even XML for storage and retrieval.\u00a0 XML is great at moving, exchanging, and marking up information for display.\u00a0 But from what I’ve read most people seem to agree it’s not great for storage of anything of real size, or anything that needs to be accessed very often and very quickly.<\/p>\n
The more I use Dialog the less impressed I am by it.\u00a0 It strikes me very much as a tool that was amazing in its day, but severely limited by available hardware.\u00a0 Now that hardware is ridiculously fast and cheap, its limitations are purely artificial and indistinguishable from clunky design.\u00a0 I know many people who swear by command-line interfaces, and I know there are studies showing CLI to be more “efficient” for the most expert of users, but there has to be a reason why 99% of the world uses Windows or MacOS (or Gnome or KDE even if they run Linux).\u00a0 If it takes a year for most users to reach expert status and reap the efficiency benefits, but users can master a 20 percent less efficient GUI in a week, which is better?\u00a0 And I say that from the point of view of someone who used DOS for years and is comfortable coding in notepad.\u00a0 And it’s not as if creating a GUI means you have to abandon the CLI completely–both can happily coexist.<\/p>\n
There are some major structural problems.\u00a0 The fact that Author name entry isn’t standard across Dialog is nonsensical.\u00a0 I understand where some fields in chemistry databases will differ from fields in business databases, but nearly everything will have an author, and all that do should conform to a standard.\u00a0 The advantages of controlled vocabulary dwindle when nothing is well controlled.\u00a0 Descriptors differ from one database to another, may or may not be updated, etc.\u00a0 A well-designed relational database would help to eliminate these sorts of problems.<\/p>\n
It would not be hard to make a system like Dialog with a relational database.\u00a0 Give a decent programmer or dba complete access to Dialog’s data and a year full-time, and I bet they could come up with something.\u00a0 The biggest problem would be trying to reconcile all the weirdness of the individual databases, like truncating hyphenated names and such.\u00a0\u00a0 Designing the tables and fields in MySQL for ERIC and a couple others would be a fun little project that would take less than a week.<\/p>\n
I wonder – has there been any effort to bring Dialog into the current decade, or even the 1990s?\u00a0 How many people still actually use it, with so many library and journal catalogs going online?\u00a0 I know Medline is available elsewhere.\u00a0 I asked a friend of mine majoring in LS at Pittsburgh and she said one professor showed it to them in one class, but no one ever actually used it.\u00a0 I understand the difference between being able to search fields vs the web, controlled vocab, etc., but surely there’s a less aggravating system out there that includes these features?<\/p>\n
I mean, just the whole bluesheet thing…\u00a0 searching with the Find on this Page feature of your browser?\u00a0 You should never rely on your visitors to have a specific browser feature, and search boxes aren’t too hard to do.\u00a0 The Dialog Database Catalog is a series of randomly chopped up PDFs?\u00a0 And none of this is integrated into any of their telnet-workalike interfaces?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After my first expose to the Dialog structured search system I wanted to put down some thoughts about relational databases.\u00a0 There may very well be reasons why flat-file text databases are better for systems like Dialog or OhioLink, but I really don’t think they are the ones I’ve heard mentioned in class. The first major […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[170,414,32,412,35,413,415,244,36,417,418,177,416],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-catalogs","tag-cli","tag-controlled-vocabulary","tag-dialog","tag-flat-file-databases","tag-gui","tag-library-science","tag-mysql","tag-relational-databases","tag-search","tag-structured-search","tag-user-interface-design","tag-xml"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}