#171: Enable tags of arbitrary / huge length
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  vengmark     |       Owner:  vengmark
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new     
  Priority:  minor        |   Milestone:          
 Component:  WebTag       |     Version:          
Resolution:               |    Keywords:          
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------

Comment (by vengmark):

 Here's my rationale for keeping it like it is. You're very welcome to
 thrash my arguments :)

 1. 1000 bytes is the MySQL upper limit of unique keys. In the case of the
 user-record-tag unique key, that amounts to 331 UTF-8 characters. To go
 above this, we would have to either simply remove the unique key (enabling
 users to use the same tag multiple times on a record), go with ASCII, or
 do the unique check in Python.
 1. Since the tag column uses
 [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html varchar], an N byte tag
 only consumes N+1 bytes of storage space. This would be the same no matter
 the length of the column, so reducing it would only save data if people
 try to use '''longer''' tags. I.e., we would only gain storage space by
 thwarting users' attempts at entering longer tags.

 On the other hand, after using Delicious for >five years my longest tag,
 [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/05/01/1935250/Censoring-a-Number
 hex09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0], is 35 characters. Granted, I use a
 lot of abbreviations (no EuropeanOrganizationForNuclearResearch for me,
 thanks!), so I don't think that's relevant for physics. IIRC, we want
 users to be able to use full names instead of abbreviations, and then it
 could get really long. Does anyone know of a HEP relevant abbreviation
 which expands to more than 331 characters?

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://invenio-software.org/ticket/171#comment:4>
Invenio <http://invenio-software.org>

Reply via email to