Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe-Integrator

[Stanley A. Klein]

At 06:34 AM 11/7/2002 -0500, Jan Ischebeck <address@hidden> wrote:

>I want to discuss GNUe integrator, because I probably will need it soon. 
>
>IMHO the proposal just speaks of integrator as a program which moves data
>from one kind of database schema into another, but IMHO GNUe integrator 
>should be able to do more. F.e. read data from a flat file, or all other
>kind of "data sources" in a broader sense. Please comment, which stuff
>integrator should/could do and which it definitly should not do.
>
>* import data from databases 
>* export data to databases
>* modify data in a rule engine
>* keep two tables in different databases in sync 
>* export data to different formats (flat file, csv file, ...,)
>* load data from different formats (flat file, csv, XML ....)
>* load data from a logfile (always just load the new added part)
>

Some comments:

1.  I think all the things you list are likely to be important.

2.  I don't know if it is Integrator or something else, but it might be a
good idea to be able to store data in XML files and to connect forms and
reports to those files just as though as the data were in a database, i.e.,
changing the data would have the effect of editing the XML files.  I can
think of security issues that would be solved by being able to do this.
For example, something like this could simplify the maintenance of secure
patient medical records or student educational records, given some of the
US legal requirements for privacy in patient and student records.  (BTW, I
think the European requirements for privacy are more stringent than the US
requirements, and I suspect the same technology would help satisfy the
European requirements.)

3.  I think that what you describe can do this, but in the past I have had
a need to "version" a database, i.e., create multiple versions of a
database, primarily as cases for math modeling.  (I once built a system
performance model in SQL and ran it against different versions of a
database that contained system component capacity parameters  and system
workloads.  Because the DBMS was Oracle, and because that version of Oracle
made it somewhat difficult to maintain multiple versions of the same
database, I had to export the database to ASCII files and reload the
database from ASCII every time I wanted to change versions.)

4.  For what it's worth, I recently needed some code to convert a Dbase
file for eventual use in GNUe.  I did some searching and found some code in
one of the Python repositories that converts from Dbase format to an SQL
equivalent. Let me know if it would be useful for Integrator.


Stan Klein