{"id":931,"date":"2012-05-18T13:13:06","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T11:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/?p=931"},"modified":"2012-08-06T10:32:35","modified_gmt":"2012-08-06T08:32:35","slug":"gendb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/2012\/05\/gendb\/","title":{"rendered":"GenDB"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’v been involved\u00a0for many years with helping, developing, working with an uncle of mine’s genealogical<\/em> research – at least the ‘IT’ side of things. Over this time I developed more than one solution to house a database for storing all the relevant data gathered – first an Access database and later stand-alone application using either the old Access database or newer sql express. Lately I’ve been trying to find a way to get away from the clumsiness of having a separate piece of software installed to get a database. It just makes setting up and maintaining an application so much more difficult – since the type of person using these applications are usually very close to ‘computer-illiterate’ or just doesn’t care ‘how it it works’ but rather just ‘that it to works’.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been working to create something that does not require a traditional database but is still easy to maintain and troubleshoot if needs be. I choose to use a plain and simple xml file. You might start to\u00a0think that this is bad idea because of various reasons like loosing all the features built into professional database systems. But you would be wrong for the ‘wrong’ reasons \ud83d\ude42 . Let me explain. For the purpose of this system the requirements are different from what you would expect when using a ‘traditional’ database. Consider this – for this little ‘system’ the following are applicable:<\/p>\n