Structuring Structural Biology with PostgreSQLs

As a biology major and a dba I made a point of attending this session on Structuring Structural Biology with PostgreSQLs. It was very interesting to hear that a researcher in the discovery phase of interesting genes was able to download Postgres, extract it, install it, put it to use and have better uptime then the production Oracle systems. Having going through a lot of Oracle training I will vouch for the complexity of Oracle databases. However Oracle is putting a lot of work into auto-configuring which I'm not sure if this will help or not.

The slides for this presentation are not online yet but I can summarize the presentation as taking the gene sequencing data, cut it up into manageable segments, and get a md5 hash against it to see if it matches existing sequences. One particularly cool data management method was being able to figure out most of the members of a family of a particular type of protein in minutes by running a SQL script. A similar project to come up with similar results took two months. When I find out the slides for this and other presentions I'll update this entry.