Developers IRC Meeting, August 31, 2007

Developers Meeting August 31st, 2007

Place: irc.katipo.co.nz #koha Time: 16:00 GMT: http://tinyurl.com/2bteuw

Database Design (10 minutes)

• Installer SQL should not cause FOREIGN KEY violations -- MJ's response to Bug 1386
• remove all SQL92 keywords as field names
• SET SQL_MODE='ANSI_QUOTES'
• Design for date field with NULL rather than '0000-00-00'
• no quotes around integer values (default '0' becomes default 0

Database Maintenance ( 10 minutes )

• best way to maintain an authoritative database definition
• role of updatedatabase
• best way to handle upgrades from 2.2, etc.
• best way to handle upgrades from 3.0 to 3.1

NOTES:

Paul's technique for version control includes adding:

$DBversion = "3.00.00.003";
if (C4::Context->preference("Version") < TransformToNum($DBversion))
{
     $dbh->do("create the tables we need for label management");
}

I'd like to decide on a clear set of steps for how to maintain SQL in Koha -- one thing I agree with MJ on, is that one person should maintain the SQL. Also, I think there should only be one authoritative source for the SQL structure definition (kohastructure.sql) and there should be a way to 'prove' that updatedatabase (or whatever replaces it) is identical to the official structure.

Secondly, I think we need to discuss the versioning scheme that's in place a bit. For one, we've not yet released 3.0 yet, so it should be starting at 2.9.

Table Walk Through ( 40 minutes )

• walk through the database tables one by one