Hi James. On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 11:30:24PM +0100, jmulford@legionaries.org said:

Friends down under and all over,

I've been "observing" the list for several months from Rome, Italy and would like to ask a few specific questions, hoping that the answers will convince our Systems Engineer to choose KOHA over AMICUS.

Here goes:

1. Is the MARC and z39.50 support up to par for a major installation? I've seen activity in the list but would like to know the current status and future targets for these features.

As Steve points out, it's not ready for primetime yet. Having said that, it's not a lack of will that has prevented it going in, more a lack of spare time (or money, with which you seem to be able to turn other programmers time into spare time of your own :-). So my guess would be that if you had a few dollars to throw at the problem, the MARC and z39.50 support could be added in pretty quickly.

2. Can KOHA confidently handle our 100,000+ multi-language volumes, with a growth rate of 10,000 a year? How far do you think KOHA can go, or is the sky the limit? Do you recommend MySQL or another DBase?

Horowhenua has about 86K items (74K biblio entries), running on a dual PIII 1000Mhz Athlon, 1.5Gb disk and a single IDE disk drive, and it just coasts along. I suspect that if you take whatever hardware Amicus needs for your requirements (I'm guessing Quad Zeon or Sparc, 4-8Gb RAM, fast SCSI disk array), then Koha would fairly rip along. Fundamentally, Koha is limited by how fast your SQL engine can run - the more RAM and faster disks you give it, the faster it'll go. As for whether we recommend MySQL or something else, the SQL in Koha is, as much as possible, server independant - it all runs through the perl DBI libraries, which in principle mean that you can use MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL, or even (cough) Access. In reality, there are probably a few bits of SQL that are somewhat MySQL specific (generally optimisations to use indices more efficiently), but it wouldn't be a difficult job to port it to another DBI supported engine. Having said that, we've no particular plans to change - if it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for us :-). We did actually start the project in 1999 with PostgreSQL, but had to drop it when we tickled bugs in the query optimiser that caused queries in PGSQL to take as long in minutes as MySQL took in seconds. These bugs were acknowledged by the PGSQL developers at the time, but our timeline didn't really give us an opportunity to wait for the fixes, so we trucked on with MySQL. Since then, I assume the bugs are fixed in PGSQL, but lots of the reasons for choosing PGSQL over MySQL are now moot - MySQL has had a lot of the useful features of PGSQL added to it over the last couple of years.

3. Does anyone have experience migrating from ALEPH or AMICUS to KOHA? I know it seems like a downgrade, but I love the opensource spirit and the full customization. Besides, I'm the University Administrator (Bursor) and the price is VERY attractive too!

We'd prefer to see it as gaining the true and righteous path, rather than a downgrade :-). Having said that, although we do have some experience with Aleph, we've never converted one from the other. OTOH, if you can get the data out of it easily, in a sensible format, then a conversion shouldn't be too problematic.

4. Any knowledge of other people in Italy (or nearby) using KOHA who might be able to lend us a hand?

No idea, but then, nobody is obliged to tell us if they use it, and a google for some of the terms in the opac shows it popping up in some of the most unlikely places.

5. Any news about porting KOHA over to Windows NT/2000/XP? (POST- Jan. 24, 2002: Andrew Hooper ahooper@microsoft.com <mailto:ahooper@microsoft.com> )

I don't know where this has got to - Perl, Apache and MySQL work pretty well on Win32 now, we've just never bothered to sit down and spend the few days it'd probably take to get it all working together - unfortunately, we don't all get educational discounts for MS code, and we don't have a customer clamouring for it, so there's been no particular incentive to shell out the shekels for MS licenses :-(.

6. Anyone at Katipo looking for a FREE fortnight in Rome - with a little KOHA customization on the side, of course? Offers are welcome. Seriously! (Chris, Rachel, Simon, ... You can answer off list if you prefer.)

Well, you'd need to take that up with Rachel, but we do have programmers that could make the trip, we've even one who speaks Italian :-). If the Regina Apostolorum University was happy to spend an amount of money that was larger than *free*, but *significantly* less than I imagine an Amicus or Aleph install costs, then I'm sure we could get you all the features you're after included, without any difficulty. Cheers Si

James Mulford Director of Finance & Development

Regina Apostolorum University Via degli Aldobrandeschi 190 Roma, 00163

Tel: (+39) 06.66.52.78.00 Fax: (+39) 06.66.52.78.92 Videoconference: (+39) 06.6652.7962 www.upra.org <http://www.upra.org>

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At 19.19 25/05/01 +0200, you wrote:

...

Friends,

Greetings from Rome, Italy! This is my first post to the list. I'm a member of a consortium of 16 Universities in Rome with all our libraries containing a little over 2,000,000 volumes. Most have been using Aleph300 for the past 10 years and are seriously considering switching to AMICUS (used by British Library, Australian & Canadian National Systems, etc.) but I recently came across the Koha Proyect and have been impressed. ...

James Mulford Director of Finance & Development Regina Apostolorum University >

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