2018-11-06 

Owned by Eric Jansson
Last updated: Nov 16, 2018
2 min read

Agenda

  1. Introductions (5 mins)

  2. Review origins and goals of SIG (5 mins)

  3. Community use cases: attendees to describe what changes they hope to make – 2-3 mins each – 20 mins

  4. Discussion of community priorities – 20 mins (discussion)

    1. From what we know of use case, what are the community priorities?

    2. Can we rank these in importance?

  5. Next steps – 10 mins (discussion)

    1. What do we want to accomplish or do by the next meeting (Nov 28)?

Participants

  • Andrew Rice
  • Archana
  • Brad Bannister
  • Dante Fernandez
  • David Gallegos
  • Erik Joranlien
  • Geoff McElhanon
  • Josh Allen
  • Kris Hagel
  • Lalanthika Vasudevan
  • Mark Masterson
  • Matt Warden
  • Phillip Heimes
  • Ryan Headley
  • Tarun Verma
  • Shannon Kerlick
  • Eric Jansson
  • Stephen Fuqua
  • Cy Jones

Notes

Attendees shared their use cases. In this process it was revealed that the main concern was cost of SQL licensing is high, especially in cloud deployments where existing organizational licensing may not apply. In terms of costs, large scale was also cited: costs may be manageable in smaller deployments but scale linear-ally (such as in LEA collaboratives where each LEA has a physically separate database) Other reasons were listed:

  • System integrators and others in similar roles listed that they wanted more ability to offer customer choice of platforms
  • The ability to develop solutions reusable across the K12 sector, and to not have local licensing as a barrier to such adoption
  • "Philosophical" opposition to proprietary software and/or preference for open source as a community good was cited several times

A question was raised about service-based options and if these had special concerns? These engines use the source code and service interfaces of other databases, but may have proprietary elements (as they are deployed as services). No concerns were raised by the group; the assumption was that support for an open source engine would be expected to transitively apply to SAAS engines based on that open source database.

A second question was raised on if NoSQL/document-store/unstructured databases were in scope? In the discussion that followed, the group advised that this was a lower priority and a question for later, with the priority now being the licensing costs. However, there were several members who cited potential utility of such systems for store of less structured data, and that this would likely apply to certain domains (e.g. survey data, video data, etc.)

Actions

  • Stephen Fuqua at the Alliance will be documenting the dependencies in the Ed-Fi technology stack on SQL and doing a "gap analysis" on porting that stack to open options.
  • Double Line also offered to share a gap analysis they did on porting Ed-Fi technology to Aurora




Materials