[bip] [BioPython] [OT] Revision control and databases

[Ivan Rossi]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Leighton Pritchard wrote:

> Hi Giovanni,
>
> On 23/10/2008 12:30, "Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio" <dalloliogm at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The problem is I don't know if databases do Revision Control.
>> When I used flat files, I was used to save all the results in a git
>> repository, and, everytime something was changed or calculated again, I did
>> commit it.
>> Do you know how to do this with databases? Does MySQL provide support for
>> revision control?
>
> Databases are just collections of data.  Database Management Systems (DBMS)
> such as MySQL and PostgreSQL do not (AFAIAA) do revision control themselves,
> but they can be used for it, if you build that capability into the schema
> and also control database submissions appropriately.  There are a number of
> content management systems that implement version/revision control on common
> DBMS, like this.

If you use an Object database such as ZODB, you can rollback the state of 
the database even after committing the transaction. That is one of the 
advantages of object vs relational db (...there are drawbacks too...)

http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~harm/ZODB-Tutorial.py (txt file: search for undo)
http://zope.org/Documentation/Articles/ZODB2

Ivan

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