Installation

Installation

Design of the Installation

To use the Raquel DBMS, the user must install not only the Raquel DBMS itself, but also a 'Driver' application to feed the DBMS with statements to execute, and to receive the DBMS's responses to a statement's execution.

A DBMS 'response' is a sequence of error codes - which will be empty if execution proceeded correctly to completion - and a sequence of relational values (= relvalues) - which will be empty if the statement is not designed to return one or more relvalues or an error occurs.

A Raquel Teaching Tool is provided as a 'Driver' application. It is designed to make it easy to learn and write statements in the RAQUEL notation, to have them executed by the DBMS, and to display any errors and relvalues resulting from the execution.

The Raquel DBMS is built and then installed as a static library, in a standard location for static libraries. This provides the potential for other 'Driver' applications to link to the DBMS.

The Raquel Teaching Tool is built in the installer's nominated directory. Its build process automatically links it to the DBMS library. However the Raquel Teaching Tool utilises Tcl/Tk, which therefore must be already installed. The Teaching Tool uses Tcl/Tk's dynamic libraries; softlinks to them are used so that the Teaching Tool can link to them regardless of where they are installed.

Implementation of the Installation

Currently both the Raquel DBMS software and the Raquel Teaching Tool software only run on Linux/Unix.

Both are available on Sourceforge for downloading to the installer's computer. They appear under the Files menu option of the Raquel Database System project; for each, a traditional 'tar' file is provided under the LinuxTarFiles submenu option.

The GNU Autotools build system is used to create the installation system for the Raquel DBMS and Teaching Tool. The Summary of the GNU Autotools document gives an overview of its modus operandi.

After a 'tar' file has been downloaded and unzipped, the result includes files generated by the Autotools system so that the standard Linux installation procedure, using the /configure and make commands, can be carried out.

The document Installing the Combined Raquel DBMS and Teaching Tool describes the complete installation procedure. The document TCLTK_ON_LINUX File provides background information about Tcl/Tk installations.

The installation procedure for the Teaching Tool includes execution of the bash script SoftlinkToTclTk.sh, which is provided to create the softlinks to the Tcl and Tk dynamic libraries.
The script is provided because linking to the Tcl/Tk libraries has sometimes caused difficulties in the past. The document Extending the Raquel Teaching Tool's Installation procedure to Better Handle Tcl/Tk describes the problem and the solution needed. The document Design of 'SoftlinkToTclTk.sh' describes how the bash script solves the problem.

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