[Koha] Koha Newbie Questions

[Jon Bek]

Hello, and please forgive me if I haven't navigated to precisely the right
forum for Koha Newbie questions:

I am the IT Project Manager for a very large public school district
currently running the Sagebrush (now Follett) Accent product, which in turn
uses the Unicorn engine (2003 version) created by Sirsi.

On of our largest challenges with the architecture of our existing product
is that the architecture is dependent upon two databases: BRS (for full text
search) and OPAC.  Nor does it appear that the division of labor between BRS
and ORACLE is clean -- we can see that there are patron user indexes and
other objects used by BRS that make no sense if the tasks were segregated as
simply as they have been portrayed.

Due to the number of libraries we serve (680+) and the number of titles in
our OPAC (7,000,000+), a batch job which should run nightly to synchronize
BRS temp and permanent indices and Oracle records very often cannot complete
after hours.  This batch (ADUTEXT) may not run during business hours, as it
interferes with ordinary central cataloging tasks, as well as certain tasks
(inventory, adding brief marc records, importing new copies of arriving
shipments) in the field.

I am interested in evaluating Koha, but am concerned by the touted "Dual
Database" nature of Koha.  This sounds very much like a trip down the same
dead-end street we've encountered with Accent.

Does anyone have insight & experience to share with me about batch or
periodic processes required to maintain Koha (especially "nightly" stuff),
or a better understanding of the the Koha architecture, and why it would or
would not pose similar problems for an operation our size?

Thanks in advance!

-Jon
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