The ZIMS Database

By Rich Langree,
Sql Server DBA

Hassan wrote in his last post about the positive discussions last week in San Diego around UI –User Interface – the way ZIMS looks and feels to the user (see his post from March 13).

I’d like to briefly mention the discussions in San Diego that focused on the ZIMS database. A database is pretty much any pool of information that can be searched by a computer and deliver answers to search requests. In the world of hi-tech, database architecture has to be one of the geekiest areas. I’ve been working on database design for 20 years, and it is difficult to explain in everyday language.

What I think is important to the ISIS community is this: a group of database experts and I have been working on ZIMS database issues now for months now. The large vision underlying ZIMS – all the world’s zoological data in one searchable web library – makes for a complex database because of all the different ways our community asks questions of the database and retrieves information. I anticipate that when it is up and running the ZIMS database will be among the most complex and technically advanced databases yet designed.

Those of us who have been spending time creating the ZIMS database have developed diverse ideas about what can make it work best – meaning FAST. I am pleased to report that the intensive discussions on the ZIMS database last week have resulted in agreement within the ISIS team regarding the plan to refine its design – to make significant improvements in the way it is managed and to simplify how it works. These refinements will take a couple of months to implement. In the end we will have a much faster and more stable database. As the intricate work on finishing all the code for the many ZIMS pages moves along in the next few months, it will be great to know that the larger database changes are already completed.

There’s a lot of good news to report as ZIMS moves fast in its new direction, and this is just one piece of it.