RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com>]

RefDB stores far more information for a bibliographic reference than
just the bibliographic data. As RefDB was designed from the ground up
as a collaborative tool, it is necessary to store a part of this
information, like personal notes or availability information (i.e. a
URL to an electronic offprint or a description where to find that
paper copy), separately for each user. So the database is necessarily
relational, which cannot be achieved with a flat file. Another reason
for using a database server is of course the better scalability. A
flat file is fine if you collect a few hundred references, but it is a
bottleneck if your workgroup collects several thousands of
references. Searching a flat file of that size with regular
expressions and several search criteria is not very performant.

I don't know why you want to put your database under CVS control, but
if you have to you can do similar things with RefDB. You can either
dump your databases to a SQL script (which is a plain text file) or
you can retrieve all references in RIS format (which again is plain
text). Both formats would be suitable for CVS and can re-create the
SQL database.

Future versions of RefDB will support different database servers (so
from your point of view you can choose your poison), including an
embedded SQL server which does not need an external database server.

regards,
Markus

Jens Emmerich writes:
 > That's about the only thing I miss at the moment: a flat file database
 > suitable for CVS.
 > 
 > Jens

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/