Monday, April 28, 2008

Tikiwiki on an Oracle Database?

I love Wikis. They rock. I use tiddlywiki for ad-hoc note-taking and for a journal file. In combination with Keybreeze, I can make a journal entry almost as fast as I have the thought.

But, I'm an Oracle database programmer. I work in a place with a documentation problem. To me one of the big obstacles with documentation is Word. As a Developer, the thought Process is something like this:
  • I need to document that.
  • Open Word
  • Where is that documentation template that we agreed on in our Programming Standards.
  • What was I doing?
  • Oh screw it.
So, I've given myself the challenge of trying to convince management here that a wiki could help with the documentation. The benefits being:
  • Consistent, clean output.
  • Backup -- happens with the database.
  • Fast, simple formatting.
  • Easy to get to -- it's just a URL.
Here is what I'm looking at for the initial Proof of Concept:
  • Oracle XE on my laptop.
  • Tikiwiki
  • Oracle's endorsed PHP Zend [NOTE: I forgot -- I have EasyPHP installed from a former attempt -- I'll use that for the proof of concept.]
  • Apache, of course.
So far, I downloaded Oracle XE -- it went off without a hitch. Very impressive, Oracle. Thank you.

Then, I ran the tiki database install script just to see if it would go. It wants to throw indexes on some of the LOB objects, which isn't supported (at least on XE). I'm worried that may be a problem down the road, but we'll see. I don't know that an Oracle index would really do any good on a LOB, though, since you are probably looking for something in the middle of the LOB, which wouldn't use the index anyways. We'll have to see if it totally messes up searches.

Now, I need to install the PHP and configure Apache. Yuck.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you fix things, please share them.

http://dev.tikiwiki.org/How+to+get+commit+access

Best regards,

M ;-)