[Umlaut-general] SFX A-Z Ver 3 Problems

[Ross Singer]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Long term, it might make sense to move away from having Umlaut directly
> query the SFX MySQL db.  An alternate solution is to have Umlaut
> periodically take an 'export' of the SFX db, and cache it locally, for A-Z
> lookup functionality.  That's in fact what Umlaut used to do, way back in
> the day. It might make more sense.  But there are some tricks there to, as
> far as how Umlaut is going to get that data export.
on would be to continue to get the data by a direct SQL
> connection, but to do it in bulk, and cache all the data in a local Umlaut
> table.  This would still require an SQL connection, but the SQL connection
> would happen "off line" at regular times, not "on line" as part of every
> individual A-Z transaction, so the dependencies would be more minimal.

Since this was my contribution, I might as well weigh in on it, since
there is some real-world justification in keeping such a mechanism.

The reason why we used it at GaTech was because:

1) SFX was hosted consortially:  we had no MySQL access (which would
be true of EL-hosted SFX, as well)
2) Our SFX instance actually managed a subset of the resources
actually resolved:  SFX would merge the results of the consortial
instance (the resources available statewide, provided by GALILEO) and
our local resources.  So this wasn't the result of a query on a single
table, no matter what.

We were able to set up a nightly cron that exported the full title
list from the GaTech instance (GALILEO's was monthly, because they did
no editing between KB loads) and checked to see if there were any
changes from day to day.  From that, we pulled (in Python, Ruby was
too slow for this) into the local database structure and provided a
fulltext index with Ferret.

To answer your question, Jonathan, yes it contains all of the alternate titles.

With regards to David Walker's Scholar export solution, we were unable
to use this, either.  By default, SFX ships with a .htaccess only
allowing Google and EL (maybe) access to the export file.  GALILEO
either didn't know how or wouldn't change this for us.

Of course, on the other hand, we had strong suspicions that the
Scholar export file wasn't properly integrating the GALILEO and GaTech
holdings, anyway, so this might have been a non-starter (but I'll
never know).

I guess what I'm getting at is that Umlaut was originally created,
more or less, as a reaction to having very little control over how we
could make SFX work the way we wanted: both as a result of GALILEO and
Ex Libris.  I don't think this is an edge-case.  I understand that
given the fact that all of the current implementors have local SFX
instances this isn't a top priority, but I do think it should be given
some consideration in the future.

-Ross.