13.0054 document database?

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Sun, 30 May 1999 23:12:27 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 54.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 23:17:41 +0100
From: "by way of Humanist <humanist@kcl.ac.uk>" <brownh@hartford-hwp.com>
Subject: Document database query

I'm sure this is a FAQ, and so my question is primarily a request for
citations and some very general direction in choosing the appropriate
type of data storage.

I need to store 5-10,000 HTML history documents in such a way that a
visitor to a web page can quickly search the full texts or access the
documents through the topical menu hierarchy.

There is a bewildering array of possibilities for storing plain ASCII
documents. Their size varies considerably. A very few are accompnanied
by images, although that is not a prime consideration.

At present, the documents are simply located in a directory hierarchy
and accessed through a menu system. As such they could be searched
with WebGlimpse.

However, moving to a database might have some advantages, one of which
is my learning something useful. I'd like to gain some experience
working with a relational database such as MySQL or PostreSQL. Or even
a full OODB, although that might be in some way counterproductive for
plain text files. Likewise, it would be nice to utilize XML, but I
don't see that as useful for documents that are to be full text
searched.

Haines Brown

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