[Koha] KOHA questions

[Brad]

Hello all,

I have a few questions I thought I'd throw out there. I am the system
administrator for a very large public library system that is not happy with
its current material management system. We have been quietly looking around
for alternatives, getting some preliminary information. Many of the
technical people here are open-source advocates, which led us to take a look
at KOHA.

On the KOHA website, it says that the software is for small to medium-sized
libraries. What would you say is the upper limit in this in terms of number
of branches and records? Is this limit simply a result of the user interface
or of the underlying structure? What if I threw out the ballpark figure of
around 300 branch libraries and around 15 million records? I always had the
impression that MySQL was very scalable.

A few people here are concerned about the concurrency issues that are
present in MySQL. The last thing we want is records being edited by two (or
more) users at one time and getting strange results. Has MySQL made advances
in this realm lately? Do any of you have experience with this?

Otherwise, we really like the simple layout of the whole system. Clearly,
before we could even start to think about implementing KOHA, we would have
to commit large amounts of resources to developing it more. As good as it is
right now, there is some functionality that we absolutely need (such as
Z39.50 support, very in-depth transaction reports, inter-library loans
reports, etc, etc, etc...). This idea of getting into real and dirty
software development excites some of our people, while it frightens others.

Thanks to everyone in advance for reading this and I look forward to the
responses.

Kind regards,

Brad