Frank Arensmeier wrote:
Hi all.
In short, I am working on a system that allows me to keep track of
changes to a large amount of short texts (a couple of thousand text
snippets, two or three sentences per text). All text is stored in a
database. As soon as a user changes some text (insert, delete, update),
this action is recorded. Look at an article on e.g. Wikipedia and click
"History". This is more or less what I am trying to accomplish.
Right now, my "history" class that takes care of all changes, is working
pretty much as I want. The thing is that both the original text and the
altered text is stored in the database every time the text is changed.
My concern is that this will eventually evolve into a serious problem
regarding amount of storage and performance. So, I am looking for a more
efficient way to store all changes.
Ideas I have come up with so far are:
1) Store the "delta" (=the actual change) of a text change. This could
be done by utilizing the Pear package TextDiff. My idea was to compare
the old with the new text with help of the TextDiff class. I would then
grab the array containing the changes from TextDiff, serialize it and
store this data into the db. The problem is that this is every thing
else but efficient when it comes to smaller text (the serialized array
holding the changes was actually larger than the two texts combined).
2) Do some kind of compression on the text to be stored. However, it
seems that the build-in compression functions from PHP5 are more
efficient when it comes to large texts.
Any other ideas?
thank you.
//frank
ps. I notice that Mediawiki also stores complete articles in the db
(every time an article is updated, the hole article is stored in the
database). ds.
Hi Frank,
why don't you simply make use of systems specifically designed for such
things. eg. CVS or SVN (subversion.tigris.org). You could pretty easily
tie it in with your application. It's quite compact, and pretty fast too.
- Tul
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