This chapter briefly lists features which are either not yet implemented or which don't work as they should or which work differently on different platforms. These things may be implemented or fixed in future releases, respectively.
The clients do not use a dynamic buffer to read the data from the application server. This may result in timeouts if you view the results with a pager that can't buffer large amounts of data in the background. To avoid these problems, it's prudent to redirect queries that return large amounts of data into a file.
The query results can only be sorted by ID (default) and publication year.
The length of the query string is limited to approx. 4kb. This can be increased at compile time.
There is no automatic duplicate check for references.
There is no automatic keyword scan.
The database server that refdb uses (MySQL) does not support transactions (this is about to change in upcoming versions). Therefore any action that changes the contents of some database may corrupt the database if something goes wrong. refdb of course tries hard that nothing goes wrong programmatically, but errors are possible.
Due to limitations in MySQL, refdb currently supports only a limited range of character sets (default is latin-1). Unicode will be supported in future versions of MySQL.
Other database servers than MySQL are not supported yet. Support for PostgreSQL (which already supports Unicode) is work in progress.
Export of bibliography styles is not yet implemented. Keep the XML files!
Export of bibliography styles to BibTeX .bstfiles would be really cool but is not implemented yet.
The memory footprint of the application server could be reduced by moving code into a shared library.
Installation and operation still needs some basic skills in MySQL administration.
There are no manpages yet.