Wednesday, May 14, 2008

About Blogs

Today I was reading about blogs itself. Wikiepedia gave lot of references for Blog. Some interesting things are tumblelogs, sousveillance etc.
Yesterday for one of our projects which is building a product for a customer,I came across two issues. This is for corporate social networking site. The customer want to build the site on Sharepoint Server 2007 with lists. THe max no. of users is 100,000. For me it was strange to note that they don't want to use database. In the worst case scenario, there are going to be 100,000 * 100,000 entries (that means each employee knows every other employee in the company) which is 10 ^ 10 lists. I suggested to convince the customer to use Database for this purpose.

The second one is building hierarchy. One of the questions I asked is whether the hierarchy is a strict hierachy (that means each node has only one parent). This can be easily built using a tree. But in a social networking site, this is not possible. Then one need to think about 3-D trees (or we can call it as cones). Where each level can be linked among themselves and each node can have more than one parent . I was wondering whether any one else has created such a data structure. How will you visually represent this in a 2-D browser?

1 comment:

Ashutosh said...

MOSS List & contents are finally going to be stored in a database. Will it be more beneficial to store data in a separate database rather than use MOSS infrastructure?
Since the backend is anyways a database, scalability may not differ much.
One advantage of having a separate DB could be the freedom to have an optimized data model for this purpose. But we would be losing out on built in app tier support - web services, data entry frontend etc.

Managing that many number of lists will definitely be an issue.