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[Gnumed-devel] Some suggestions to make gnumed more efficient


From: Christoph Becker
Subject: [Gnumed-devel] Some suggestions to make gnumed more efficient
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 13:18:43 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)

After more than a year, again I did check out Gnumed, just to see how
far it has grown.
Here are some questions I asked myseld and some sugestions:

First:
Why does Gnumed not have dumps of its database-schema and a pg_dump of some testdata in the cvs? By this it would be a work of a minute or less to have the Gnumed database in the running PostrgreSQL cluster, ready to
inspect and evaluate the gnumed databasedesign.
Instead anybody interested in Gnumed has to try to build a database
schema with "bootstrap" skripts - which for me at least did not
work. First I had to figure out, that I have to find the 'client'
directory, copy it to my python's site-packages, rename 'client' to
'Gnumed' and then insert an apporiate gnumed.pth file into
site-packages. OK, there are other ways too, but why don't you have a
skript doing this, or  at least a README/INSTALL, telling this?
Finally at least I could run a bootstrap.py which seemed to be the right
one, but then I just got endless rows of
"service [cNull instance] => database [cNull instance] => server [cNull
instance]"
and then I gave gave up.

Second:
Why does Gnumed not have a detailed graphical schema from its database?
When I started with my dental application I got me a graphical
database-designer-tool (http://www.datanamic.com), build the database and the tool produced the PostgreSQL schema, by just a very few mouse-clicks. I could import that schema into PostgreSQL and after some trials I had a reasonable base to start with devoloping the GUI.

Then I stopped using the database-designer-tool and switched over to
improve the database with EMACS in sql-Mode. For the development and
insertion of triggers, inserting new columns, edit checks, rules and so on in a production database, this approach showed to be practical. With the new version of there Datanamics Dezigntool you can even add checks, triggers and more.
Today I too use PostgresAdmin III a bit.
Would I have to share the design of my database with others (as gnumed
has to do if it will stay and grow), the most natural thing would be to
get the latest version of a reverseengineriong tool like importer script from datanamic.com or a comparable reversenginering tool to produce a detailed picture/map of my database's design with the coresponding graphical database design tool.
Yes, Gnumed may have such a tool with autodoc, at least to some degree.
But if this works, why don't you have detailed maps and pictures of the
database-schema as jpeg and/or pdf files on the website? I for example don't use Linux any more since I need software as speechrecognition which is not available for Linux or which is much more expensive for Linux). Also, wxPython seems to have more problems with windows, which implies, that an application which is running well on Windows can much easier be adapted to run on Linux than the other way.

My conclusion:
Gnumed at first should concentrate on delivering an easy to install and easy to understand PostgreSQL database.
That is to say,
first
offer zipped dumps in human readable text format wich can be imported in
a running Postgresql-Cluster.
To produce this, if the Gnumeddatabase is 'gm', just run
pg_dump --file=gnumed-de.txt --create --schema-only gm
for the German edition, or
pg_dump --file=gnumed-au.txt --create --schema-only gm
for the Austrailian edition.
Zip the resulting dump and place it into the cvs-tree under 'dbschema'
Inform the user about the options used for dumping the schema with a Readme-file.

second
get you a database-reenginering tool and a graphical database designtool to produce a detailed graphical map/picture of the the database and place the maps/pictures as jepg and/or pdf files into the 'dbschema' directory. If I can get a working schema as pg_dump I can produce a gnumed schema with dezign for Database and it's importer script, since I will update to their new version.

third
use something as
pgsql --file=testdata.txt --data-only --inserts gm
to produce a test-data-dump to play with and place this to in the
'dbschema' directory.

Based on this more people may become interessted and involved with gnumed.

Kind regards
Christoph Becker






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