the DB problem

The Relational Database Problem

24 October 2003
This has come up repeatedly, and is one of the burrs under my saddle often enough that it's time to try to summarize again. Most recently, the Internet Scout Project Scout Portal Toolkit (which requires a Linux server and MySQL) and a white paper from www.safe.com on Web-based data distribution systems for GIS (and the related problems of ArcSDE) are the specific irritants.

Tom Whaley wrote a proposal for RDBMS development in July, and this perhaps reopens that. van Assendelft, Ballenger, Bollinger, Blackburn, and I all responded, but nothing further developed

My complaint: we don't have readily available support for DB projects in any of the Information Management sectors of the college. "Support" needs to include more than licensing and allowing software to run on the institution's machines: there should be people to whom one can go to develop applications using the specific technologies, or adapt applications that others have created, and someone should have the responsibility of managing the evolution of the institution's capabilities with those technologies. Nobody is on this case...

Some of the symptoms, mostly presented as assertions that need the leaven of comment from people who know more about the current state of things than I do:

Our faculty mostly don't have DB projects;
our libraries mostly use proprietary packages that aren't extensible (Annie, forinstance...) and aren't actively working to develop or even to explore digital library possiblilites [DSpace being a primary example];
University Computing doesn't "support" any of the more powerful DB products, and Access is not "supported" with consultants;
Computer Science does teach a DB course, and some students have basic competence --but somebody who wants to develop an application of DB technology has no source of support;
Bob Ballenger supports his own use of Oracle, and teaches a Management course using it;
the ITG struggles with MDID and considers other management alternatives for image collections;
the status of Marc Conner's Ireland project and W&L's involvement in the REALIA project is... ?
management of spatial data resources could be done with ArcSDE, but not without specialized DB support

Alsos is the one bright light... though there may be active development and support in the Law School

There is nobody whose assigned responsibility is to break the logjams and MAKE a plan... and no sense that this SHOULD be an institutional priority. Everybody seems to be waiting for somebody in authority (the Provost? the President?) to DEFINE DB support and development as a goal/problem, and assign resources.

We are "falling behind" in that many peer institutions DO have more and better support and opportunity --or anyhow that's my feeling, without much real data to back up the assertion. Certainly there's a lot going on out there that we SHOULD be more active in. How do we get there?