Perhaps a mistake to ask this here (heresy I suspect) but I would be
interested in the perspectives of people who make a living at this.
Background: I am a molecular biologist trying to build a database
containing genomic data, strain details, community info (people,
publications etc....). Everything except the genomic data is currently
housed in an object-oriented acedb database. In conversations with
other groups who are going through the same transition we are someone
stated that:
".....is perhaps evolving its schema _more_ now that sequencing is
finished and annotation is really picking up speed, you should not think that
the changes are going to get less ! You will have to deal with problems like
genes that get renamed but you still need the old name around, how to cross
reference oligos to many parts of sequence, how to organise RNAi data that may
end up matching multiple chromosomes etc. etc. I don't want to put you off, but
as far as I aware, constantly evolving schema is not one of relational databases
strengths."
Their solution is to maintain a mixed system of acedb and a relational
db: where the working dbs are all acedb and the web site is a mixture of
an acedb server and a relational relational db. The data in the mysql
database is directly derived from the acedb reference database.
Any thoughts?
regards,
Charles
