Re: Wiki software for genealogy (long)

singhals wrote:

Yeah. "Good enough for what it's for and fully-functional today" beats "When we've ironed out the bugs, this will be the one everyone wants" hands-down over any given 5-year plan of business.

Business plans are for people who want to sell products. Their 5-year view may well be that today's new product will be so obsolete by then that customers will be forced into buying an upgrade. Their plans may be no more closely aligned with those of potential users than is sufficient to persuade the customers to buy. I assume that most of us here are more interested in usage than selling.

Not to mention, current genealogy programs do one thing well, whether it's lineages or events. You can kludge most of 'em into doing the other, and you can even browbeat 'em into doing a migration database, but they won't do 'em as well as a dedicated program will.

It's arguable that if you can't do the whole job well you're not doing either thing well.

I don't believe in the one-program-suits-all-purposes, any more than I believe that a single screwdriver will solve all my carpentry needs (or that I need only one saucepan).

Which is why a first requirement should be for a package, not a single program, to be built around a database for which a decent toolset is available - at the very least for reporting. The database's schema should be open. And don't let's get involved in yet another of those gedcom-as-database-format arguments: it was never designed to be other than a text file format for data exchange; it lacks ACID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID) properties, indexing, etc. that one expects of a database.

If the data is accessible in that way and the data model is well designed in the first place a whole set of programs can be built round it, either by the vendor or by sufficiently skilled users.

--
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Maintenance Plan Caused System To Hang
    ... ran DBCC CHECKDB) I was connected to the server through Terminal Services. ... Even though the server has 2 GB of RAM and is used exclusively for SQL 2005, ... maintenance plan in SQL 2005 and ran it. ... Back up the database and transaction log ...
    (comp.databases.ms-sqlserver)
  • Strategy for a databse
    ... I have some experience with building a database of people, ... regular trips but often also charters of various lenghts. ... I need to plan ... For all these things, and many others I have reports, in Excel format, ...
    (microsoft.public.access.gettingstarted)
  • Re: DBCC Checkdb,
    ... Fehler beim Maintenance Plan mit dem ich leider nichts anfangen kann. ... ich habe zur leichteren Fehlerfindung alle weiteren Step disabled - es ... bleibt nur der erste Step Check Databases über. ... The Check Database Integrity task and the Execute T-SQL Statement task in a maintenance plan may lose database context in certain circumstances in SQL Server 2005 builds 3042 through 3053 ...
    (microsoft.public.de.sqlserver)
  • Re: network permissions for Btrieve (PSQL 8.x) files
    ... should read the manual carefully (plan to have an hour of quiet time to ... database, but once implemented, you can lock out all user access from ... still use the database from both Btrieve and SQL/ODBC. ... > files for the usual client-users, ...
    (comp.databases.btrieve)