[Koha] SOS from Rome, Italy

Wed Mar 13 10:22:34 NZDT 2002

Simon,

Thanks for the detailed & very specific answers. I'll forward them to our
Systems Director. Regarding the "more than FREE" trip to Rome, I'm sure
something could be arranged. We're a small private University with not a LOT
of money to spread around but I think something "significantly" less than an
AMICUS installation might be attractive to all concerned. Again, Kudos for
the great spirit at Katipo and for a world-class product.

I'll see you OFFLIST ;)

James Mulford, L.C.
Director of Finance & Development

Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum
Via degli Aldobrandeschi 190
Roma, 00163

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Simon Blake [mailto:simon at katipo.co.nz] 
Sent:	martedì 12 marzo 2002 5.51
To:	Mulford James LC
Cc:	koha at lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject:	Re: [Koha] SOS from Rome, Italy

Hi James.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 11:30:24PM +0100, jmulford at 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 at microsoft.com <mailto:ahooper at 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>     
> 
> =========================================================
> 
> 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 >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list
> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

-- 
Simon Blake                                             simon at katipo.co.nz 
Katipo Communications                                       +64 21 402 004