I've been playing with the newer release of Magma. So far my tests have gone well. However, I have a few questions of applicability that I hope someone can help me answer.
First, I have a need to deploy an application for a small call center, where every call is recorded. Currently, the system creates an entry in a MySQL table indicating the source of the call (caller- id in case of someone calling in, or the extension of the agent in case the agent is making an outbound call), the destination (again, in the case of an outbound call, it would be the destination number, or in the case of an incoming call, it would be the agent's extension number), a timestamp, and a file name.
When a call comes in or is made, the system makes an entry in this table and stores an MP3 file in a directory of the system. What I was wondering if it would be applicable and make sense, is to store all this information in a Magma database. Meaning, store the call meta information as well as the actual audio content. At first, I don't think there would be a problem. However, I was looking at the current system and they have approximately 200GB of audio content stored in over 100,000 files (in a period of 6 months).
As additional requirements, the system should allow for the "easy" search of call records by either date, agent, or phone number. Also, the actual call "object" should be stored in the customer profile so that when reviewing the customer record, historical call recordings can be pulled.
Is this too much to ask for? Will searches be too slow for such volume of objects being stored? The way I see it, there really isn't a complex object hierarchy being stored. It's mostly flat list.
The second question of applicability I have is something that came to mind when reading the book "The Data Model Resource Book" by Len Silverston. This two-volume book shows universal data models applicable to most industries. Their target is relational databases but their models are easier represented as complex object models. As a matter of fact, they go through very complex relational data models in order to represent things I think would be much easier represented with object models. Anyway, just as I went through the book, I figured it would be interesting to model some of their ideas using Squeak and Magma, which brought me to the following questions based on some generalized ideas of an object model:
The book "models" people, companies, entities, etc as a general object called a Party. Therefore, a party could be "sub-typed" as a Person, Organization, etc, where a Person can be further "sub-typed" into entities like Employee, Contractor, Family Member, Contact, Customer, Prospect, etc. Organizations can also be further sub-typed into things like Internal Organizations, Competitors, Agents, Distributors, Supplier, Customers, etc. You get the idea. Basically, each of these entities can be continuously be specialized into more and more specific models, as the need arises, and the application's business rules should know how these objects should/could interact. Not that I'm planning on using these types of models for real life applications, but it is certainly joyful reading about it. They definitely made me think about how I could have modeled some of the apps I've written in the past.
Keeping the above general description of such a tiny portion of the object model in mind, I thought, well, I could definitely create a Party class with many different subclasses that can be each further subclassed and so on and so forth. Party class could store general attributes and methods common to all, including knowledge of how to persist itself and search, etc. At first, it sounds interesting, but then when the needs of searching comes to surface, there may be a chocking point in performance. Assuming a busy company uses this system, they could end up with several hundreds of thousands or millions of Party objects created relatively quickly. A user wanting to search for a customer, could specify a search criteria by, say, last name begins with "XXXX". How do you think Magma would perform? The way I think I would do this is to store all Party objects in a large collection with additional collections acting as "indices" for customers, etc. However, reading up on Magma's docs, I came across the MagmaCollectionReader and the ability to create customer indices. Would this work better? Could I create a customer index in Magma that would only store sub-classes of Party? For example, an index that would allow me to search by phone number of the class Customer, which is a sub-class of Party?
Sorry for the long post. I just have a lot in my mind and was hoping someone with more experience could either answer my questions or at least point me in the right direction.
Thanks, Daniel