SQL based storage vs SVN

Question

My team is developing a new application (C#, .Net 4) that involves a repository for shared users content. We need to decide where to store it. The requirements are as follows:

1. Share files among users.
2. Support versions.
3. Enable search by tags and support further queries such as "all the files created by people from group X"
4. Different views for different people (team X sees its own content and nobody else can see theirs).

I'm not sure what's best, so:

• can I search over SVN using tags (not SVN tags of course, more like stackoverflow's tags)?
• Is there any sense in thinking of duplication - both SVN and SQL - the content?
• Any other suggestions?

Edit
The application enables users to write validation tests that they later execute. Those tests are shared among many groups on different sites. We need versioning for the regular reasons - undo changes, sudden deletions etc. This calls for SVN.
The thing is, we also want to add the option to find all the tests that are tagged "urgent" and were executed by now, for tracking purposes.

I hope I made myself more clear now :)

Edit II
I ran into SvnQuery and it looks good, but does it have an API I can use? I'd rather use their mechanism with my own GUI.

EDIT III
My colleague strongly supports using only a database and forget file based storage. He claims it is better for persistence (which is needed - a test is more than the list of commands to execute). I'd appreciate inputs on this issue, as I think it should be possible to do it this way or the other.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Firstly, consider using GIT rather than SVN. It's much faster, and I suspect it's more appropriate in your use-case: it's designed to be distributed, meaning your users will be able to use it without an internet access, and you won't have any overhead related to communicating with the server when saving documents.

Other than that, I'm not making full sense of your question but it seems like the gist of it might be better rephrased like so: "Can I do tag-based searches/access restriction onto my version control system, or do I need to create a layer on top to do so?"

If so, the answer is that you need a layer on top. Some exist already, both web-based (e.g., Trac) and desktop-based (e.g. GitX). They won't necessarily implement exactly what you need but they can be a good starting point to do what you're seeking.

Answer 2

You could use SVN.

1. Shared files: obvious and easy. It also supports the centralised locking that you might need for binary files.
2. Versions. Obviously.
3. Search... Now we're getting into difficult territory. There is a Lucene addon that allows web searching of your repo - opengrok, svnquery or svn-search. These would be your best starting points for that.
4. There is no way to stop people seeing what's present in a svn repo, but you can stop them from accessing it. I don't know if the access control could be extended easily to provide hidden folders, you could ask the svn developers.

There's some great APIs for working with SVN, probably the most accessible is SharpSVN which gives you a .net assembly, but there's Python and C and all sorts available.

As mentioned, there are web tools which sit on top of SVN to provide a view into it, there's Trac, and Redmine and several repo-viewers like webSVN, so there's plenty of sample code to use to cook up your own.

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Would you use a DVCS like git or mercurial? I woulnd't. Though these have good mechanisms in themselves, it doesn't sound like they're what tyou're after. These allow people to work on their own and share with others on a peer-to-peer basis (though you can set a 'central' repo and work with that as everyone's peer). They do not work in a centralised, shared way. For example, if you and I both edit a test case locally andthen push to the central repo, we might have issues merging. We will have issues merging if the file is a binary or otherwise non-mergable file. In this case you have a problem with losing one person's changes. That's one, main reason for not using a DVCS in your case.

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If you're trying to get shared tests together, have you looked at some apps that already do this. I noticed TestRail recently that sounds like what you're trying to do. It's not free (alas) but it's cheap.