[Koha-devel] Merge borrowers and deletedborrowers tables

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:23 AM, Jonathan Druart
<jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org> wrote:
> Some of the existing constraints are wrong, some does not exist.
> On the 3 bug reports (see original message), I have submitted patches
> to add/fix the FK constraint, but we will loose data.
> The big advantage is... not to loose these data :)

That is not an unambiguous advantage: one's "losing" patron data is
another's "better protecting patron privacy".  Also, merging the two
tables will impose a cost on every user that has written reports that
query the borrowers table and will be faced with the task of
determining if they need to tack on "AND NOT deleted" clauses to the
queries.

That said, in Evergreen patron records do have a boolean flag that
expresses logical deletion status. That approach has generally worked,
but at the cost of requiring more code to fully delete and/or
anonymize records for patrons who no longer have any relationship with
the library.

Overall, I'm neutral on the design question of using one table or two;
I'm more dubious about the potential for disruption if we make a
change, since we're not starting from scratch here.

I note that the three bugs you've cited are concerned with the
deletion of *staff* user accounts.  A more minimal change might be to
treat staff accounts specially and devise a way to mark them inactive
instead of deleting them.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Infrastructure and Added Services Manager
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
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Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
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