[DAS] System requirements

[Thomas Down]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 05:15:11PM +0900, Todd Taylor wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We are thinking about setting up a DAS server at our institute here in
> Japan.

Cool.

> Can anyone give us some recommendations as for the installation system
> requirements? What kind of system (OS, memory, hard disk, cpu) are
> others running it on?

Obviously, it's quite strongly dependant on the amount of
data you're serving, and the way in which you're storing it.
But looking at current servers, requirements don't seem to
be excessive.  Using Dazzle, I can serve human chromosomes
(in Ensembl-format MySQL databases) without any trouble
on my aging laptop (Pentium II/300, 160Mb RAM).

In general, so long as you've got enough hard disk for the
data, I can't see any real trouble.

> And, can anyone explain the difference between the Dazzle server and
> LDAS?

LDAS is a perl-based server, backed by MySQL relational
databases (with it's own schema, based on GFF).

Dazzle is a Java servlet based DAS server framework.  Other
than the language issue, the key difference is that it uses
little `data source' plugins, which can be backed by files,
relational databases, or any other means of data storage.
The plugins present data to the server core as BioJava
Sequence and Feature objects.

If you want to hook a DAS server to an existing database,
this is probably easier with Dazzle (at least so long as you
have some basic Java experience).  If you're expecting to
have to convert the data into a new schema anyway, then go
with your language preferences.

    Thomas.