tlug: Databases

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

Dear all,

Last month there was a note from Professor Hepburn, which led to some
comments about helping to shift his compendium of dictionary entries from
dBase IV to Postgres or some other more modern form.  This is a similar
query --- but in my case I don't have any data in storage yet, and ... I'm
not particularly eminent. 

I have recently been looking at the possibility of kick-starting an
archive of English translations of Japanese laws, to be expanded and
amended by voluntary contributors across the Internet, and to be available
free to publishers and end users under an "open source" license (actually
"open object" would be more accurate in this case).

I have been thinking of initially storing the English and the Japanese
text of statutes as flat text files, spliced into the Web via a CGI.  But
if the project actually works, the volume is going to get big, and the
number of hits will be large.  Looking to the future, I should have a plan
in place for an architecture that can cope with the load.

Q1: Where is a good place to start reading up on networked databases that
    run under Linux?

Q2: Will Postgres handle Japanese text strings and paragraphs?

Q3: Are there any similar projects (in terms of computing architecture,
    not end purpose) that I can look to for models of how to proceed?

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/

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