Hi Mike,

please do submit a request. I have it on my to-do list....but is a paper list...volatile :).

yes, you are right - there will be no changes in the openser code. maybe to see if thinks can be optimized by using the ids to reduce the complexity of some queries (but this will follow).

regards,
bogdan

Mike Williams wrote:

All,

Should I submit a feature request then? I'm willing to do some work. The good thing about this kind of upgrade is that it doesn't really affect the rest of the table data at all, and I would guess it doesn't actually affect the code of openser either (Besides the database creation scripts).
Mike

On Wednesday 06 December 2006 04:32, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu wrote:
Hi everybody,

couple of ideas from my side on this topic:

1) I'm not a DB expert, so most of the ideas are based on second hand
information :)

2) RDBMS theory (or concepts) suggests that every table should have
field ID as unique number getting from auto increment sequence (state
by  Khalukhin Alex <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) when dealling with a mysql bug
related to the primary key size (see
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=743020&aid=1605410&group_
id=139143)

3) I tent to agree with Mike - when is about writing interfaces or
applications for provisioning the DB, having a one column primary key
helps a lot - especially in correlating different tables, cross
references, easy identification of records, etc

4) it is possible to help also inside openser - if you have an operation
involving 2 queries (like a select and delete), a smaller amount of
information is required to be stored (from select) in order to trigger
the delete.

5) I had some time ago a discussion with a senior mysql consultant and
he strongly advised to use auto increment ints as primary keys. I do not
remember the arguments behind (how the tables is hashed, how the hash is
balanced, how efficient data is locate, etc), as , again, I'm not to
much in DB stuff, but I recall the conclusion.

6) I already started changing some tables to have this kind of PK -
acc,missed_call table.

any other input (as technical arguments) is welcomed.

regards,
bogdan

Juha Heinanen wrote:
Mike Williams writes:
I think it would be a good idea to change all of the database tables
created by OpenSER to having the primary key be an unsigned
auto_incremented int named 'id'. The keys that are used now should
become unique keys.
mike,

i have not seen much use for auto-increment id keys in implementing an
openser management system.  if there is no really good use case, an
extra key just adds to table size.

2. Consistency. Some tables are using there own id names, when it would
be better to have just one standard one. Then, everyone would know that
the column id was an autoincremented unique int id for that table. As
of now, in some tables I find it hard to understand what the id names
actually mean. For instance, what does 'grp_id' mean in the table
gw_grp? Is it a unique id, or
is it refering to the id of the 'grp' table? I would have to look it up
to find out. With 'id' there would be no ambiguity.
grp_id of gw_grp table is NOT an auto-increment unique key.  from README
file:

 Each gateway belongs to a gateway group either alone or among
 other gateways. All gateways in a group share the same
 priority.
 ...
 Table lcr contains prefix of user part of Request-URI, From
 URI, gateway group id, and priority.
 ...
 In addition to gw and lcr tables there is third table gw_grp
 that is used to associate names with gateway group ids.

3. Greatly simplifies manual database work. Let's consider the lcr
table:

CREATE TABLE lcr (
 prefix varchar(16) NOT NULL,
 from_uri varchar(128) DEFAULT NULL,
 grp_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
 priority TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
 KEY (prefix),
 KEY (from_uri),
 KEY (grp_id)
) $TABLE_TYPE;

As it is now, it would take a statement like this:

DELETE FROM lcr WHERE prefix='A', from_uri='B', grp_id='C',
priority='D';

Just to delete one record. With a unique id, it becomes:

DELETE FROM lcr WHERE id=X;
i don't consider this a big deal when the query is created automatically
by management system.

in summary, although i don't see any urgent need, i would not oppose
adding a an auto-increment key to tables that tend to have only a small
number of rows.  but if there are tables that can be big and that
currently don't have such a key, i would carefully consider if it really
needed.

-- juha



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