Subject: [TOOLS-DEVELOPMENT] Database Redesign Status

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:36:08 -0500

I'm passing this on.

Russ

= = = = = = = = =

Now, 4 1/2 days into this effort, I've come some ways, but also found new
(although not particularly unexpected) problems due to the inconsistencies
of the old database.

I've completed one full pass of converting all drafts and their authors,
ADs, email addresses etc. to the new format, and found that one of the
few aspects of the old schema I'd kept was also broken -- the idea of
storing people's names as:

   name_prefix, first_name, middle_initials, last_name, name_suffix ...

Some names just don't fit into that model, and the model also makes it
hard to undo the breakage (some persons existing in a large number of
instances in the database, with variations in how the fields are set).

I've now changed the model to having one table of known name aliases,
which can be both ascii and unicode, and should be used to look up people,
these aliases point to one and only one instance of a person record.
This record contains a preferred ascii and utf-8 full name string, which
can be edited if preferences change, without breaking lookups and document
author relationships.

I've also added more programmatic support for resolving broken author
information, (using the draft author module from the incomplete idsubmit
rewrite) which lets me handle most of the many instances of multiple
person records for the same author which exist.

I hope that the second full conversion should be complete (with all known
broken author relationships resolved) this afternoon, before our call.

After that, the next step (I think) will be to convert the email address
information which has not been automatically pulled in by the draft &
author conversion; then I'll probably look at converting the document
history information.  After that, group membership conversion/creation,
which should cover most of the models in
   http://merlot.tools.ietf.org/src/db/new/redesign/models.png

I hope to manage the above, possibly with the exception of the groups,
during next week.

Best,
Henrik