Hi, On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Mathieu Saby <mathieu.saby@univ-rennes2.fr> wrote:
Thank you. So, just to know, do you think it would be 1. - a total waste of time ? 2. - a strange idea ? 3. - a good idea (for performance and code maintenance) ? 4. - harmful ?
to merge the biblio and biblioitem tables ?
My gut feeling is #3, but a lot of testing would be needed to avoid #4. Possibly one way to reduce risk and improve testability would be to move columns over to biblio one at a time. Here are a couple additional thoughts if we undertake this: [1] We should decide whether we want to keep both bibilioitems.marc and biblioitems.marcxml. I think we can get rid of the former. [2] Even if we merge the tables, I think we should still keep the marcxml column in its own table, e.g., one called biblio_metadata: CREATE TABLE biblio_metadata ( biblio_metadata_id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT; -- for the future! biblionumber INTEGER, metadata_type VARCHAR(10), -- for the future! blob LONGTEXT NOT NULL, -- and relevant FK contraints ); The bits about slipping in multi-metadata-schema support aside, for many queries there's no reason to pull in largish XML columns. [3] We should see if we can drop some columns. As a rule of thumb, I suggest that if a biblio/bilbioitems column isn't referred to in the code. any of the default MARC frameworks, or the SQL reports library, it's probably not being used. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org