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+Experiment 007
+Don Pellegrino [don@drexel.edu]
+
+Collection and inventory of influenza data.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The "Influenza Virus Resource" at NCBI
+[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/] exposes the sequence records and
+their meta-data in a number of different ways.  An exploration of the
+phylogenetic properties of the records first requires that the available data
+be collected and inventoried.
+
+Two primary alternatives have been identified for managing the data.  A
+relational database can be used.  IBM DB2 has been used for this.  The use of
+a relational database is limited by the difficulty in sharing the data.  Each
+vendor uses incompatible import and export routines.  Additionally installing
+an instance of a database management system (DBMS) often requires a large
+amount of effort and many not be practical on hosted environments which do not
+support the running of user daemons.  Finally proper parallelization of a DBMS
+will require additional system specific configuration for each machine used.
+
+An alternative to the DBMS is to use a container file format such as HDF5.
+This has the advantage that all of the data can be collected into a single
+file which can then be shared with others.  It has the disadvantage that is
+lacks the robust search and SQL operations provided by a DBMS.  In addition to
+two alternatives use fundamentally different storage strategies with the DBMS
+using a relational model and the contain file format using a hierarchical
+model.
+
+The "doc/Data Deployments.dia" diagram shows the source systems that
+expose the various records as well as the transform routines that are
+used for aggregation of the data on the local system.
+
+ LocalWords:  NCBI parallelization HDF SQL Pellegrino phylogenetic DBMS dia