Re: USMARC and postgresql?

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> BLOBs.  It's a pain, though, because building the indices against the
> catalogue is difficult.  I think, actually, that the PICK-based spproach is
> better, but PICK is going away.  Anyway, you likely need to talk to someone
> about BLOBs.  I can't help, sorry.

The MARC format is really intended to be used in a full-text search
environment, such as the old online systems like Dialog or Lexix-Nexis use
(although they don't use MARC specifically).  They all predate SQL and
mapping one onto the other is not an easy task.  It's easy to go from a
SQl database to one of the variable-length (or 80 column card image)
text-formats, but not the other way around unless you are into doing some
text-processing programming.

Brett W. McCoy
                                              http://www.chapelperilous.net
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