[Sigia-l] integrated catalogues?

[Listera]

Alexander Johannesen:

> Because there is a thin line between catering to the specialist and
> catering to everyone, and if you want to do the former, than the
> semantics of the two databases must match pretty good for it not to be
> an issue.

The intellectual challenge in having data in two (or more) DBs is the
difficulty not in making separate data fetches but in aggregating the
results in a meaningful way at the UI level and having a useful/usable
search UI to generate those DB calls. Network latency, DB access pooling,
normalization, etc are some of the many tedious little things one solves in
this regard, but providing a conceptually transparent input/resultset UI is
much harder. As I said in another post, creating an abstraction layer
between the UI and DB layers solves the aggregation problem, but not the UI
one.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.