[TML] Back to the 21st century SQL question.

[Christopher Hilton]

Short: I want to build a sql database to represent an arbitrary number 
of sectors as described in Book 5 Scouts using the expanded star system. 
Has anyone already done this and if so are you willing to share what you 
came up with?

Details:

      I think that it's really cool that so much high quality software 
is available to people lately. And I really like the things that I see 
like the moving Traveller maps that appear here occasionally. I'm sorry 
that I cannot remember the developer's name right now or I'd be glad to 
reference his work. I will say: "Cheers!!" because it's cool stuff.

That said while I love the Canon Traveller universe, I've always been 
more comfortable "rolling my own" when Book 5 came out it was something 
that I could really get my teeth into but at the time computer's 
powerful enough to actually do anything with were well out of my reach. 
  Times have changed for the better. There are nearly as many programs 
out there to build systems as there are opinions on how to build systems 
but  IMHO they all fall short in the storage arena. To that end I'd like 
to  specify an SQL schema to hold two sectors worth of systems as 
generated by either the Book 5 Expanded World Generation system or the 
equivalent from Mega Traveller. I want the fruits of the project to be 
available to any Traveller referee and to me that specifies that the 
dialect of SQL must be either ANSI SQL '92, MySQL or Postgresql. The 
reason for the choice of SQL is because it makes the data platform 
agnostic. A referee with an old PC should be able to install something 
like Ubuntu Linux and MySQL on a recently obsolete PC and still get 
reasonable performance. [1] The long term goal of the project would be 
to have a web based system that a referee or players could use within a 
campaign.

A vain attempt to avoid having to invoke Godwin's law on the thread:

You cannot make a choice in the computer world without offending 
someone. I've mentioned two SQL storage engines MySQL and Postgresql. If 
that's not what you are familiar with please be confident that I 
consider the best output to be database neutral SQL. That probably means 
that you may have to make some slight modifications to get your favorite 
version. At worse you should be able to get at the database with tools 
like Microsoft Access through the ODBC connector or OpenOffice.Org Base 
through the JDBC connector.

We've talked before about the characteristics of universes generated by 
the Book 5 EWGS. Specifically that they are filled with dim K and M 
stars and the likelyhood of finding an earthlike planet is really low. 
That's why I only want to talk about the storage aspect. In the long 
term this is really an attempt to address that problem by divorcing the 
widget that generates the universe from the widget that manages it's 
storage. If you do it that way you can write a system/universe editor 
and change things the way you want.





1. In Sept 2007 to me that's a Pentium III 1GHz with 512 MB Ram and 40G 
of disk space or so.

-- Chris

-- 
       __o          "All I was doing was trying to get home from work."
     _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
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Christopher Sean Hilton                    <chris | at | vindaloo.com>
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