[Koha-devel] biblio and biblioitems

[Joy Nelson]

I'm all for seeing biblioitems disappear.  The only bib of data that I
reference (in migration or support work) is the biblioitems.itype and
biblioitems.marcxml.  A lot of the other fields appear to be dupes of items
(volumenumber, volumedate, etc.) or more correctly belong in biblio (isbn,
publication year, etc).

I like Galen's idea of the biblio_metadata table and dropping (or moving as
appropriate) columns from biblioitems as seems appropriate.

Joy Nelson
Director of Migrations

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On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Galen Charlton <gmc at esilibrary.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Mathieu Saby
> <mathieu.saby at 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.
>
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