Re: [Koha-devel] optimising the opac a little

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the access.

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Chris Cormack wrote:

> Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> > 
> > So, is this all useless nonsense?  Should I crawl back under that rock?
> 
> Definitely not. Now is exactly the right time to be thinking of these
> sort of things. 

Okay cool.  I'll have a go.  Thanks for the welcome.  Can I solicit some
opinions on the researvations though?

> > 1. FULLTEXT indexes and MATCH are in MySQL as of version 3.23.23.  Is it
> > likely people are using other databases which don't have FULLTEXT indexes?
> > Is it likely people are using older versions of MySQL?

Is there a requirement to support certain databases/versions?  Postgres can
be hacked to do fulltext indexes but doesn't by default.  Do many people
use Postgres or is it all MySQL?  Would this incompatibility concern
people?

http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/21674/1954?pf=true
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/

> > 2. BOOLEAN MODE is a very recent addition.  

This is not such a big deal.  We can just turn it off if we need to, or
maybe even test for the db version and use it if it's available.

> > 3. The addition of indexes on the biblio table will slow insertions/updates
> > down.  

I can't see this being a big issue.  There is a slowdown but it's not
usually too big and it pales into insignificance compared with the
speed-ups in searching.

> The way we have it set up at the moment is that all commits to cvs get
> posted to a mailing list koha-cvs .. which allows all of the developers
> (or at least the ones subscribed) to see what each other are doing.

Okay.

> > Here is an example I've just done in PHP on MySQL with a similar database
> > structure.  There are ~20K records.
> > 
> > http://simms.celt.dias.ie/~gavin/opac/

Sorry had to take this down.  It wasn't really supposed to be public info
:-)

> Looks good to me, take a crack... you'll learn that with the Koha
> project we arent precious about our code, we want to do the best we can
> so if people can think of improvements we are more than willing to try
> them out.

Sound.

Thanks,
Gavin