topic Need opinions on data model in Alfresco Archive

Need opinions on data model

cesco75 — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:02:50 GMT

Hi.I'm designing a data model with following requirements:1) Documents should be associated to a "person", that in Alfresco will by just a numerical ID. All other infos are stored in an external DB.2) Some docs can be aassociated to more than one person.3) I will need to manage 3-4 millions of docs4

Re: Need opinions on data model

jpotts — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:37:35 GMT

I see three options:

1. Use a multi-value property that stores the person identifier (as you propose).

2. Use an association between the document object and an object representing the person.

3. Use a multi-value property on an object representing the person that stores the node refs of the docs.

The multi-value property approach will be more efficient from a search standpoint. Plus, it doesn't sound like you are storing anything about a person other than their identifier, so no need to waste an object on a person, which rules out options 2 and 3.

You said that a give person will only have about 100 documents related to them and that a given document could be related to more than one person. But how many people might a specific document be related to?

Jeff

Re: Need opinions on data model

cesco75 — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:34:22 GMT

Sorry I did't answer before and thanks for your suggestions:

You said that a give person will only have about 100 documents related to them and that a given document could be related to more than one person. But how many people might a specific document be related to?
Jeff

98% of times 1 person is related to just one document but sometimes 1 document is related to a large number of people: tens to thousands in my current understanding

Cesco

Re: Need opinions on data model

mrogers — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:55:50 GMT

Your multi-valued field containing tens to thousands should be O.K. But if it goes much above that I'd question the requirements. In addition there is a Lucene limit of 1000 docs for a search. I'd not like to see 10,000 or more values in a multi-valued field.

Where large numbers of users are associated with a document tends to be because they have a role rather than individual responsibility. You could perhaps model that through group membership.

I'd be tempted to try to model the relationship with assocs (Jeff's option 2). Just my preference

Re: Need opinions on data model

unknown-user — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:54:13 GMT

Hi,

How did you solve this finally? I have an exact same requirement. We are building a Policy Management site in Alfresco. Each policy document needs to know who all agreed to that policy, so that when a user logs in, he will only see the pending policies for him.

The nof users who agreed to a policy could be equvilaent to the nof employees in the company which would be 5K to 10K. From a performance stand point, whats the best option multi-valued property or an association between person object? Another suggestion I got the from the forum was to use Preferences service to store the list of policies agreed by a user but it has some cons.

Thanks