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<html> <head> <meta name=Title content="Session Three: lonsql (Gerd)"> <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=macintosh"> <title>Session Three: lonsql (Gerd)</title> <style> </style> </head> <body bgcolor=#FFFFFF class="Normal" lang=EN-US> <div class=Section1> <h2>Session Three: lonsql (Gerd)</h2> This section describes issues associated with LON-CAPA and a SQL database. The SQL database in LON-CAPA is used for catalog searches against resource metadata only. The authoritative version of the resource metadata is � as discussed � an XML-file on the normal file system (same file name as resource plus �.meta�). The SQL-database is a cache of these files, and can be reconstructed from the XML files at any time. The current database is implemented assuming a non-adjustable architecture involving these data fields (specific to each version of a resource). 1.     title 2.     author 3.     subject 4.     notes 5.     abstract 6.     mime 7.     language 8.     creationdate 9.     lastrevisiondate 10.  owner 11.  copyright <h3><a name="_Toc421867145">Purpose within LON-CAPA</a></h3> LON-CAPA is meant to distribute A LOT of educational content to A LOT of people. It is ineffective to directly rely on contents within the ext2 filesystem to be speedily scanned for on-the-fly searches of content descriptions. (Simply put, it takes a cumbersome amount of time to open, read, analyze, and close thousands of files.) The solution is to hash-index various data fields that are descriptive of the educational resources on a LON-CAPA server machine. Descriptive data fields are referred to as "metadata". The question then arises as to how this metadata is handled in terms of the rest of the LON-CAPA network without burdening client and daemon processes. I now answer this question in the format of Problem and Solution below. PROBLEM SITUATION: If Server A wants data from Server B, Server A uses a lonc process to send a database command to a Server B lond process.     lonc= loncapa client process    A-lonc= a lonc process on Server A     lond= loncapa daemon process                  database command     A-lonc  --------TCP/IP----------------> B-lond The problem emerges that A-lonc and B-lond are kept waiting for the MySQL server to "do its stuff", or in other words, perform the conceivably sophisticated, data-intensive, time-sucking database transaction.  By tying up a lonc and lond process, this significantly cripples the capabilities of LON-CAPA servers. While commercial databases have a variety of features that ATTEMPT to deal with this, freeware databases are still experimenting and exploring with different schemes with varying degrees of performance stability. THE SOLUTION: A separate daemon process was created that B-lond works with to handle database requests.  This daemon process is called "lonsql".   So,                 database command   A-lonc  ---------TCP/IP-----------------> B-lond =====> B-lonsql          <---------------------------------/                |            "ok, I'll get back to you..."                    |                                                             |                                                             /   A-lond  <-------------------------------  B-lonc   <======            "Guess what? I have the result!" Of course, depending on success or failure, the messages may vary, but the principle remains the same where a separate pool of children processes (lonsql's) handle the MySQL database manipulations. </div> <div class=Section2> </div> </body> </html>