recovery

[Keith A. Milner]

On Wednesday 31 October 2007 07:02:16 Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:55:07 -0600
> I can see that it would be too slow to save a 13MB xml file after every
> transaction. Why use xml anyway?

Looking at the archives, I believe the current XML database was inherited by 
the current devs. It seems everyone (or at least most people) agree that XML 
is not the correct format to store the data in (great for data interchange, 
not for storage).

Changing this is a significant task, and one which few appear to be willing to 
undertake, especially as it's likely to break some things and remove 
some "back-door" capability that some people use.

At one point there was a project to provide an optional PostgreSQL database 
instead of the XML one. This is a fine idea in many environments as it can 
provide multi-user capability, proper database referential integrity, better 
data recoverability, etc.

My understanding is that this project was never "finished" in that it's not 
well supported and doesn't support some functionality which many consider to 
be essential (such as business features, invoicing and such). I'm not sure 
what, if any, plans there are for this.

However, I believe that the overhead and complexity of setting up and 
maintaining a postgreSQL database server is overkill for many people, who are 
happy with a "local" file format, but would benefit from something better 
than the current XML format. I wonder if this is part of the reason the 
postgreSQL support seems to be going nowhere.

Musing: perhaps there is some benefit in bundling a local, lightweight 
database such as SQLite with Gnucash as a backend instead of the current XML 
one, with the option to change this to PostgreSQL for users who want this. 
Obviously this would require full support of the current business features as 
well.

Of course, this is easily stated but requires a lot of work to achieve. 
Unfortunately with my current workload I won't have time to devote to this.

Cheers,

-- 
Keith Milner