RE: [Podserver-devel] Does anyone have a database with the schema (and or any PHP code to pull the details from it) yet?

[Foster, R. - P. <RF...@qu...>]

Tom,

If you want the "remote podserver" to parse the RSS feed, then it would
almost certainly be better to have things as file based. I could be
misunderstanding you completely, but it almost sounds as if the "remote
podserver" would effectively become a mirror of items necessary to
support the active episodes in a particular feed.

That would then lead me to wonder about the propagation mechanism. How
would a feed update on a remote podserver be trigged? From a master
site? Should a direct request to a remote site trigger a request back to
the master site to determine if it is up to date? On every occasion, or
only periodically? If periodically, would it only happen when something
is requested from the remote site, or would there need to be something
like a cron job (which may not be available through many providers).
What happens if the remote site doesn't see a request for several days?
If triggered from the master site, what happens if the remote site is
unavailable? What happens if the master site triggers an update, but
then suffers from a system outage?

Like you, I have not yet needed to deal with them, and understand that
replication and clustering are complicated... but you should be aware
that what you are proposing is effectively the same thing. Replication
in particular is complicated because it provide solutions to questions
like those above.

Regards,
Richard

P.S. No, to the best of my knowledge database replication (when
correctly configured) does not require either server to go offline.
Database backups, on the other hand, often do (or at least require the
database to be placed in a read-only state) to preserve database
integrity.