Today is the ninth of March, 2007. The Dublin Core for Drupal project is now underway. After much experimentation with different database table configurations, we are now ready to start writing and testing the queries that will power the Dublin Core for Drupal module.
Tests to ensure that the data structure is both scalable and usable have produced very encouraging results. 6,000,000 dummy URIs (will be nodes, in Drupal terms), each with 11 pieces of associated metadata (including unique values) were created. A query designed to find a specific URL from a single piece of metadata executed in half a second. Not bad, considering that the laptop on which this was run has 1.5Gb RAM, and the index for the metadata table weighs in at 3.5Gb. (Index now up to 4Gb, now that a scheme field has been added to the metadata table.)