roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (02/13/88)
I've got a suggestion for the distribution of GenBank (and other
related databases). Instead of just mailing out a tape 4 times a year with
the complete data base on it, why not allow sites to ftp weekly updates?
I'm not sure exactly what format the updates should be in (being a Unix
person, I'd vote for "diff -c" output, but that probably wouldn't be so
great for the VMS, TOPS-20, VM, PC-DOS, etc folks).
The obvious advantages over the current method would be faster
updates, reduced magtape and postage costs, and less manual operator
intervention (instead of somebody having to mount a tape, we'd just fire up
a crontab deamon in the wee hours of sunday morning). I suppose there
might be offsetting disadvantages: the possibility of getting out of sync
with the master data base if you just keep applying incremental diffs to a
single archival starting point and increased network traffic. I'm sure
there are both advantages and disadvantages that I havn't yet thought of.
What do other people think of this? I suppose the best thing would
be to upgrade the entire Internet to ethernet-type bandwidth and then we
could all just put "ig.com:/usr/database /usr/database nfs ro" in our
/etc/fstab files, but that might not be practical (yet).
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016KRISTOFFERSON@BIONET-20.ARPA (02/14/88)
From: David Kristofferson <Kristofferson@BIONET-20.ARPA> Roy, I'm sure that the GenBank staff will reply in detail but I want to assure you that alternate means of distribution such as you have raised are under discussion. Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson BIONET Resource Manager kristofferson@bionet-20.arpa -------