[ensembl-dev] Perl BLOBs in the ensembl compara database

[Paul Flicek]

Although we do the best we can to make everything accessible, making everything completely independent of the architecture that we run on is not really feasible given our level of funding, priorities, etc.

Our goal with the database and API code is to serve bioinformaticians wanting to do biological analysis (rather than those wanting to write alternate API implementations :).

That said, in the medium term we will take a look at ways that we can further generalise the code and how to access the data.


Paul



On 21 Jan 2011, at 17:07, LAW Andy wrote:

> 
> On 21 Jan 2011, at 17:04, Andy Jenkinson wrote:
> 
>> The implementation as it stands essentially requires that store/read operations on the database be done on machines with the same architecture. I guess this could be made more explicit, but bear in mind it will affect use of an API written in any language (including the Perl API itself). Unfortunately I think you are always going to have to keep abreast of changes to the Perl API if you create a Java translation, whether those changes affect the database or not. The extent to which you will have to modify the Java code accordingly is going to depend on how complete your implementation is - I expect there's plenty of pure logic that could harbour bugs or be subject to update!
> 
> 
> There is a world of difference between "keeping abreast of changes to the Perl API" and having language and processor architecture dependencies actually built in to the database.
> 
> Later,
> 
> Andy
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