[Koha] newbie questions

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

I'm just looking at Koha potentially for a library here in our school.
Congratulations to all involved and thanks for releasing it under the GPL.

I have installed it and am tinkering about.  It's on a 400MHz P2 w 128MB
RAM running Debian GNU/Linux (sarge) in a MySQL database and I installed
the sample data from sampledata-1.2.gz.  The sampledata didn't insert
entirely perfectly but it seems reasonable for testing.  

I was wondering about a few things. 

1. The major book data seems to be in one table, including authors. I would
instinctively have separated the authors into a separate table.  Is this
just a decision to favour simplicity over normalisation or am I missing
something?

2. There are no indexes on the biblio table.  Is this deliberate, did I
lose something in installation or are we expected to add our own
afterward?

3. The doc recommends not using mod_perl.  Is this just because it's not
tested or is there a more specific reason?  I would imagine adding 

4. It seems rather slow.  Each search request is taking 3-5 seconds.  The
machine is running my desktop apps but isn't terribly stressed.  I've tried
using mod_perl and adding indexes but I get the impression that the time is
mainly being spent within the perl code itself.  Is this normal performance
or have i done something wrong?

Many thanks again for providing this system under the GPL.  Hopefully it
will save us a lot of time and effort.

Gavin

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