[Koha-devel] Merging authority records can corrupt data

[Pedro Amorim]

Hi Thomas,

Not sure if this will help but what is the value of the
*AuthorityMergeLimit* sys pref?
I think the default value is 50 and any authority being merged with more
than 50 linked biblios will be processed by the
*misc/migration_tools/merge_authority.pl
<http://merge_authority.pl>* cronjob (which runs daily by default if I'm
not mistaken).
If the problem you're experiencing is indeed related to having lots of
linked biblios, maybe lowering this value (or setting it if empty) might
help?

In the past I reported an issue with subsequent authority merging (that get
queued to be processed by the cronjob):
https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=22437

But I believe this has been fixed.


On Fri, 30 Sept 2022 at 12:19, Thomas Klausner <domm at plix.at> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> It seems that merging authorities with lots of linked biblios can lead
> to data corruption (at least in 21.05):
>
> The merging of the auth record itself seems to work, but the linking of
> the biblios from old to new auth record happens inside a normal
> synchrone web request. If this requests times out (because there might
> be a lot of biblio records to relink), some of the biblios still point
> to the old auth, which is already deleted. (At least this seems to be
> happening, based on the complaints we got from librarians)
>
> I guess the only fix is to handle authority merging via background jobs
> / job queue.
>
> Is this a known bug? I couldn't find anything about that in bugzilla?
> If yes, is there a timeframe when it will be fixed?
> If no, I will create a bug (though reproducing it will need some weird
> fixtures in the DB..).
>
> In any case, the Steiermärkische Landesbibliothek is keen to get this
> working, so I could give fixing it a try. But this will need some
> discussion, I assume? As I suppose this will be a bit more work than a
> single-line fix in a template, I'd like to have some backing by other
> Koha-devs, that this behaviour is indeed a bug, and that using
> background jobs is the correct way to fix it.
>
> Greetings,
> domm
>
> --
> #!/usr/bin/perl                             https://domm.plix.at
> for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
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