Yggdrasil

[DarrylLundy]

Just finishing working my way through Leif's website.
I am a long time TMG user (10 years+) with a database now up to around
475,000 people. The slowness of the release of TMG8 and the minor
update that it represents is starting to get me worried that TMG isn't
going to make it past the migration away from Foxpro.
Plus I have just discovered that Foxpro has a 2Gb file limit - and my
name file under TMG is currently at 0.99Gb, so I don't think my
database is going to scale past 1m people (another 10 years work) if
it stays on the Foxpro platform.

Hence starting to think about what other commercial app out there will
meet my needs. Like Leif I think TMG has the best data model out there
still, but would like to see it based on a real RDMS like mySQL or
Postgres.
So anyway, I plan on spending the next few days getting Yggdrasil
working on my setup, and having a play with it.

Darryl
www.thepeerage.com (TMG database published with SecondSite).

[Leif Biberg Kristensen]

On Jul 27, 2:02 pm, DarrylLundy <aslrati...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just finishing working my way through Leif's website.
> I am a long time TMG user (10 years+) with a database now up to around
> 475,000 people. The slowness of the release of TMG8 and the minor
> update that it represents is starting to get me worried that TMG isn't
> going to make it past the migration away from Foxpro.
> Plus I have just discovered that Foxpro has a 2Gb file limit - and my
> name file under TMG is currently at 0.99Gb, so I don't think my
> database is going to scale past 1m people (another 10 years work) if
> it stays on the Foxpro platform.

Darryl,
475,000 people is a staggering number, and a name file approaching 1
GB is enormous compared to my own database, which fills a measly 80 MB
on disk.

I agree with your analysis that the situation should be worrying for
TMG users. However, Yggdrasil is not intended as a replacement for
TMG; while I owe a lot to the TMG model, there are several differences
between the two. As I migrated my data from TMG when it was at version
4, I have no idea of the developments in TMG since then.

For one thing, the source model is entirely different as you probably
have realised by now, and the migration of sources from TMG to
Yggdrasil is a major manual task. I converted ca. 400 major sources
and some 4,000 unique 'citation details' into my first iteration of
the source hierarchy. I used some traditional UNIX tools to simplify
the task somewhat, but most of that part is undocumented. I may still
dig up a couple of scripts if it's of any use to you.

Secondly, I've scrapped the separate name table, and only record one
'universal' name per person. On the other hand, my source transcripts
will always reflect name variants in their original context.

Thirdly, there are no 'primary' events (nor 'primary' relations) in
Yggdrasil. If you record two birth events, they will have equal
status.

> Hence starting to think about what other commercial app out there will
> meet my needs. Like Leif I think TMG has the best data model out there
> still, but would like to see it based on a real RDMS like mySQL or
> Postgres.

Regarding MySQL: That was the only database backend with which I had
some experience as I set out with Exodus, and naturally my first
attempt at a production database used MySQL. However, I very quickly
became disgusted by its total lack of input validation. At the time
there was no support for stored procedures in MySQL either, so I soon
went for Postgres which still continues to impress me.

> So anyway, I plan on spending the next few days getting Yggdrasil
> working on my setup, and having a play with it.

I wish you good luck, and I'll follow your experiments with great
interest.

Regards, Leif.

[Darryl Lundy]

OK, I have had to give up on getting Yggdrasil installed.
Have spent the last two days trying to get the various apps needed for
Yggdrassil installed on my Ubuntu machine and on my Winx64 machine.
Problems with the Ubuntu install I have encountered were:
- can't get Postgres 9 installed on it - it will only install 8.4 and then
insist that is the latest.
- seem to have an empty httpd.conf file for Apache which I can't edit
- I don't know how to point Apache at the Yggdrassil directory

Neither Apache2 nor php would install without errors on my Winx64 machine,
so gave up on that even quicker.

Most of my dev experience to date has been with ruby, rails, MySQL and php -
I don't know anything about apache or postgres, so I think this is just too
steep a learning curve for me.
Good news is that I have been able to figure out how to export my TMG
database into a bunch of CSV files, and import these into MySQL. So if I
ever decide to give up on TMG )because it looks like being stuck on Foxpro),
I have the confidence that I can build my own app with rails if necessary,
or migrate my data to something else without teh huge data loss I would be
looking at with gedcom.

From what I can see, Yggdrasil would be a good starting point for my needs,
although it would be nice to have:
- multiple names per person - I have a lot of titles I track in my database
- places modelled as a hierarchy like Leif's sources, with a rate range
associated with each place and linked to the replacement name for a place,
with geo-coordinates. So that if a person was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia in
1950 and died in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1999, these events are actually linked
to the same place with the same lat/long, but the database knows which name
to display depending on the date of the event.
- ideally, some sort of multiple user feature, so I can give certain other
people permission to log on and edit the database as well.

Regards
Darryl

--------------------------------------
128 Heke Street
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND

Interested in the family histories of the British aristocracy? - see my
website www.thepeerage.com

[Leif Biberg Kristensen]

On Jul 30, 7:06 am, "Darryl Lundy" <dar...@thepeerage.com> wrote:
> OK, I have had to give up on getting Yggdrasil installed.

That's a pity.

> Good news is that I have been able to figure out how to export my TMG
> database into a bunch of CSV files, and import these into MySQL. So if I
> ever decide to give up on TMG )because it looks like being stuck on Foxpro),
> I have the confidence that I can build my own app with rails if necessary,
> or migrate my data to something else without teh huge data loss I would be
> looking at with gedcom.

If I were you, I think that I would have considered a Wiki-based
solution, like WeRelate.org. It should be possible to transfer all
your data more or less automatically.

> From what I can see, Yggdrasil would be a good starting point for my needs,
> although it would be nice to have:
> - multiple names per person - I have a lot of titles I track in my database

A Wiki can also handle multiple names to the same article via
redirection.

> - places modelled as a hierarchy like Leif's sources, with a rate range
> associated with each place and linked to the replacement name for a place,
> with geo-coordinates. So that if a person was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia in
> 1950 and died in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1999, these events are actually linked
> to the same place with the same lat/long, but the database knows which name
> to display depending on the date of the event.

You can't always determine where a place name actually is located.
IMO, there are so many exceptions to the rules wrt place names that
any attempt to force them into a hierarchy will fail.

> - ideally, some sort of multiple user feature, so I can give certain other
> people permission to log on and edit the database as well.

That's on the TODO list with Yggdrasil. With a Wiki - no problem at
all.

regards, Leif