I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or MixI have to develop a notes application and handle some relational information.

Like:

“Problem Category” and Providers

Thinking in relational databases I have the next tables

Category:

catId

catName

Provider:

provId

provName

provTel

provXcat:

catId

provId

level

in some forms and mails I need information combined from cat and prov. What is your opinion.

I must to make a notes application and acces some relational database to get that info or…

I must to make notes forms for cat y prov?

Please, I need your suggestion

Thank you in advance

and sorry for my english

Guille

2

Subject: I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

Hello Guillermo,

It really depends on the data structures and relationships you need.

Here are some guidelines:

If…

  • You need to maintain information that fluctuate in real time every split second with zero fault tolerence

  • You work with a lot of hard date (data mining, statistics, financial datas, mathematical calculations, and so on)

  • You need N-N relationsips between data

…then go for a RDBMS, such as Oracle. Notes doesn’t handle record locking very well (and didn’t handle it at all before version 6) and cannot handle complexe data relationship such as manufacturing, logistics or accounting application requires.

However, if…

  • You need a highly secure environement, where critical data can be stored safely and accessed in a granular way

  • You will store a lot of “soft data” - knowledge, images, email, fuzzy information difficult to store in predefined structure

  • You need full text search capabilities, including attached documents

  • You need approval cycles, digital signatures, workflow where documents are moved from people to people and notifications are sent by email and integrated into the application

  • You need to develop whole integrated systems 5 to 10 times faster than the usual IT market development cycle

  • You need to publish and get secure data to the Internet and/or Intranet, with individual portals per user

…then go for Lotus Notes.

That is why most large corporations work hard to integrate both a RDBMS such as websphere/Db2 and a collaborative platform like Lotus.

HTH

Nicolas Abesdris

Quintessence e-solutions

3

Subject: RE: I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

Thank you for your reply.In that case, I need to make a Notes help desk application but what can I do with some information like categ and providers (N to N) .?

4

Subject: RE: I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

I have developed a full fledged help desk application in Notes about 3 years ago, so it is perfectly feasable.

But the real question is: exactly WHAT kind of information you need to extract from your data?

For instance:

You have a form for a problem category.

You have a form for a provider.

In the provider’s form, you include a lookup field to associate a provider to a problem category. Make it a multiple value field, and you can have a list of problem categories associated with a provider.

This lets you dispatch a problem to the right provider, and it lets you display all providers categorized by problem category.

SO far, so good, Notes can handle all that easily. This is a 1-N relationship: 1 provieder associated with N categories.

If each problem category also has N keywords - for instance each category has N areas.

you still have 1-N relationships; 2 levels of 1-N relationship connected together. That’s pretty much as far as you go with Notes. You can go deeper, but you eventually hit limitations. That’s why a manufacturing “bill of manterial” for instance, is a bad application for Notes.

Now let’s imagine you are ALSO interested to find all the providers for a given problem category. A view can be designed to lookup that information. But you can’t get the information directly. You must choose your reltionship direction. The problem category document doesn’t “know” the providers associated with them. But you can build a hidden view with all the providers documents, sorted by their problem category, in order to find a list of providers for a given problem category.

If all your data relationship are that simple, then you don’t need a RDBMS.

HTH

Nicolas Abesdris

Quintessence e-solutions Inc.

5

Subject: I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

How many docs/records are we talking about?

6

Subject: RE: I need your opinion . RDBMS or Notes or Mix

category: about 40providers: about 150

help docs will use that information only for references.

7

Subject: Then do it all in Notes with @DbColumns and @DbLookups for values.

I think the RDBMS would be too much overhead.