Re: [tkined] SNMP to SQL

From: Eddie Corns (E.Corns@ed.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 16:08:46 MET


   Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 13:53:53 +0200
   From: Alexios Zavras <zvr@aueb.gr>
   Precedence: bulk

   Back in the discussion of putting SNMP data in databases,
   I'd like to ask a more fundamental question.
   Do people use SQL features ? I mean "SQL" (structured queries)
   instead of just "Database" (store/get).

To be honest I'm not sure yet. The main point is that you never know what
way people are going to use the data. Far too often I have been frustrated
using a system because the designer didn't consider that other people might
have different needs and didn't bother putting a little bit of effort into
making something more generic (HPOV springs to mind for some reason). So I
wanted to see if it was possible. However I do anticipate some usage of
structured queries to help detect behavioral patterns and trends (OK I'm doing
a bit of hand-waving here but it's my time :).
A full SQL implementation is perhaps over the top but it's the only thing I
know of for doing ad-hoc queries (in reasonable time).
Actually, I think I will put some thought into exactly how I might use the
data and how easy/hard it is to extract. Glad you brought that up.

   I was working on the same path as people already mentioned here
   (collect with scotty, store in MySQL), when I realized that
   *for my needs* there was no gain in using an SQL database.
   I've since changed DBMS, and currently use berkeley db
   straight from Tcl. This database just gives you a generic
   (key,data) structure, which of course can accommodate
   whatever you want to store.

   The major advantage, I think would come from a temporal database,
   since almost all of my data are associated with a timestamp.
   However, I haven't found one I can readily use (and I doubt
   there exists one).

How about a self-optimising declarative logic database, but look how long it
took SQL to reach the availability it now enjoys.

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