On Jan 17, 2007, at 2:59 PM, Bess Sadler wrote:

> As long as we're on the subject, does anyone want to share strategies
> for syncing circulation data? It sounds like we're all talking about
> the parallel systems á la NCSU's Endeca system, which I think is a
> great idea. It's the circ data that keeps nagging at me, though. Is
> there an elegant way to use your fancy new faceted browser to search
> against circ data w/out re-dumping the whole thing every night?

Sure isn't elegant, but as our Real Systems Guys don't want us to
look at the production Oracle instance (performance worries), we've
had pretty good luck screen-scraping holdings and status data, once
we get a Bib ID. Ugly, but functional, and surprisingly fast.

Of course, spamming the OPAC with HTTP calls certainly impacts
performance more than just querying the database... but I digress.

In a perfect world, we'd get a trigger / stored proc on the database
server when circ status changed. In a slightly less perfect world,
I'd just keep a connection open to the production datbase server for
all of that.

-n