[ckan-discuss] question on datastore, filestore and data/metadata storage in CKAN

Tue Nov 12 16:14:23 UTC 2013

Hi everyone,

I have a basic question that will probably sound silly, but I'm getting more
and more confused on how CKAN organizes physically datasets... 

Question is: What is exactly the data/metadata storage model CKAN uses?

To be more clear, are data from datasets always stored with metadata, or
just metadata are locally stored in the CKAN instance, and the dataset can
remain stored somewherelse? (I'm thinking of the case of a harvested
dataset, not to a dataset which is inserted from scratch).  
What is it actually stored in the backend postgres database? Just metadata,
and data go eventually to the file system or remain remote? SOLR, in this
architecture, index both data and metadata?

Finally, what is the exact function of the filestore? Is it used to store
locally the data? Or just the metadata? 
Does the datastore duplicate data/metadata already included in the
filestore? 

Thanks a lot for putting some light on this...

Cheers,
-Elena 