Next Previous Contents

6. Creating Your Own Database

Whenever we create a new database with Zebra, we find it useful to first set up a new, empty directory. This directory will contain the configuration file, the lock files maintained by Zebra (unless you specify a different location for these), and any logs of updates and server runs that you may wish to keep around. The first thing to do is set up the zebra.cfg file for your database. You can copy the one from the test directory, or you can create a new one using the example settings described in the previous section. Once you get your server up and running, you may want to read the description of the zebra.cfg file in the general documentation, to set up additional defaults for database names, etc.

If you copy one of these files, you should be careful to update the pathnames to reflect the setup of your own database. In particular, if you want to specify one or more directories for the register files and/or the shadow files, you should make sure that these directories exist and are accessible to the user ID which will run the Zebra processes.

You need to make sure that your GILS records are available, too. For small to medium-sized (say, less than 100,000 records) databases, it is sometimes preferable to maintain the records as individual files somewhere in the file system. Zebra will, by default, access these files directly whenever the user requests to see a specific record. However, you can set up Zebra to maintain the database records in other ways, too. Consult the general documentation for details.

Finally, you need to run zebraidx to create the index files, and start up the server, zebrasrv (the server can be run from the inetd if required), and you are in business.

To access the data, you can use a dedicated Z39.50 client, or you can set up a WWW/Z39.50 gateway to allow common WWW browsers to search your data. CNIDR's Isite package includes a good, free gateway that you can experiment with.


Next Previous Contents