Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!mcclb0.med.nyu.edu!smith
From: smith@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Re:  RDBMS for GenBank sequence data...
Message-ID: <1990Nov25.092031.6959@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu>
Date: 25 Nov 90 13:20:31 GMT
References: <9011241736.AA05688@domain.lanl.gov>
Organization: NYU Medical Center, New York, NY, USA
Lines: 45

In article <9011241736.AA05688@domain.lanl.gov>, michael%domain@LANL.GOV (Michael J. Cinkosky) writes:
> 
> Ross,
>     Your message is a bit unclear to me.  You seem to be saying that
> GenBank is about to choose an RDBMS and that you are afraid that we
> are going to make a choice that will have a negative impact on you
> and others in the community.

Yes.

>     The fact is, however, that we purchased an RDBMS (Sybase) several
> years ago and have been using it to maintain GenBank internally for
> several months now.  We continue to produce the flatfile distribution
> with which you are familiar.  There are no plans to stop this form of
> distribution at any time in the near future.

Thanks.

>     We are in the process of establishing a number of dynamic satellite
> copies of our relational version of the database at remote sites.  At
> this time all of these sites are running Sybase as well, but our software
> for maintaining these databases has been carefully designed to be RDBMS-
> independent.

This is really what I needed to know.

>  (We have already done a port to Oracle, which we have a
> trial copy of for this very purpose.  As long as Ingres, or any other
> RDBMS, supports a C-callable, run-time configurable SQL interface
> there is no problem in porting our code to support it....most RDBMS's do
> support a low-level C-callable interface that we can use in porting our
> software.)
>     Given all of this, I do not see that there is any problem brewing,
> but perhaps I am simply not understanding your questions.  Does any
> of this help?  Are there other concerns?

I think this answers it very nicely.  I was most concernend that there be a 
RDBMS-independant scheme, and a way to get code running using the system we 
may have to get.  Thanks.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Ross Smith, Cell Biology,  NYU Medical Center,  550 First Ave.,  NYC, 10016|
|Phone: (212) 340-5356: FAX: (212) 340-8139 (Alternate NYUMC) (212) 340-7190|
|E-Mail:  SMITH@NYUMED.BITNET (BITNET),  SMITH@MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU (Internet)|
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