Library: Design Considerations
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Given the focus of this problem on searching and incrementally updating
information on individual books in a large, mostly static collection, the
obvious architectural choice for this problem is a database-oriented
system.
Building on this premise, we can consider many interesting design
variations:
- How should the applications interact with the database? While some
results must be produced in real-time, some transactions could be bundled
for batch processing.
- How centralized should the system be? Both the database and the
applications could be distributed over multiple machines.
- Does the type of the database influence the choice of the software
architecture? It is conceivable that object-oriented database systems
are biased towards different implementations than relational databases.
It would also be interesting to consider designs that do not localize
circulation information in a database.
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Updated Halloween 95 by
Mary Shaw
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