[Firefly-dev] About the xml way

[firefly-dev]

Hi,

I thought about the idea of gimpy in his last msg and I have to say that
it is really appealing.
My only concern is about the efficiency of this system, however since we
have never tested it we can't know how much it can be slow, so I thought
we should write some benchmark tests.
We just need to write xml files like the patron.xml in the cvs, put them
in a server and then read/parse/write them using small scripts in perl
*and* in python. 
Execute tests from another computer would be better to test the net
overhead, but for now maybe we can avoid.

I'm thinking about the directory structure proposed by gimpy, 
we could have something like this (just an idea for now):

/libraries
        /library01
                /patrons
                        /patron_id  (lastname isn't unique)
                                loans.xml
                                patron.xml
                                ....
                /staff
                        /staff_id
                /catalog
                        /books
                                book_id.xml (a big library here has             
                             thousands files)
                        /newspapers
                        /cdrom
                        etc...  
        /library02
                etc...

This is very basic but I think it is enough for tests, however we should
put lot of files to have a fair benchmark.

The tests I've done with db have been done on 100.000 records, and it
tooks about 0.3 sec to retrieve all books info, this without network
overhead since it was all in my pc.

If you agree this evening I'll add the directory structure in the tests
folder with some xml file randomly generated.

BTW how much space do we have on the cvs ?

Marco