Mailing List Archive

Database extension
I suggest to add two new fields to the database (cur table)
* cur_namespace (varchar) so articles can be distinguished by namespace
without using the "LIKE" MySQL query (this was mentioned before)
* cur_is_redirect (boolean) so #REDIRECT pages can be excluded likewise

As you can see, I now try to discuss things instead of just doing them ;)

Magnus
Re: Database extension [ In reply to ]
On dim, 2002-05-12 at 02:29, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I suggest to add two new fields to the database (cur table)
> * cur_namespace (varchar) so articles can be distinguished by namespace
> without using the "LIKE" MySQL query (this was mentioned before)

Should there be a separate title-without-namespace field as well, or
would cur_title now be that?

We want to be able to group things by namespace (ie, count the talk
pages) but also group things by title ignoring namespace (ie, watchlist
includes an article and any talk/whatever pages).

> * cur_is_redirect (boolean) so #REDIRECT pages can be excluded likewise

Not a bad idea! Might it be even easier to make it a string field which
contains the name of the page being redirected to? This would save
parsing the #REDIRECT [[x]] line or relying on the link tables when
doing mass checks in, eg, "links to this page".

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
RE: Database extension [ In reply to ]
On dim, 2002-05-12 at 08:17, Magnus Manske wrote:
> > > I suggest to add two new fields to the database (cur table)
> > > * cur_namespace (varchar) so articles can be distinguished by namespace
> > > without using the "LIKE" MySQL query (this was mentioned before)
> >
> > Should there be a separate title-without-namespace field as well, or
> > would cur_title now be that?
>
> I think a namespace field would do fine for now, as most of the slow queries
> look for the namespace.

Well, the statistics checks do I suppose, but the watchlist and
list-all-namespaces functions check for everything with the same
non-namespace portion. No?

> > > * cur_is_redirect (boolean) so #REDIRECT pages can be excluded likewise
> >
> > Not a bad idea! Might it be even easier to make it a string field which
> > contains the name of the page being redirected to? This would save
> > parsing the #REDIRECT [[x]] line or relying on the link tables when
> > doing mass checks in, eg, "links to this page".
>
> I agree. A boolean field might be faster, but not by much.
>
>
> Concerning the {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} function, we should implement a
> cur_has_commas (boolean) field while we're at it. It seems to be the best
> way of telling articles apart from stubs. Or, we should name it
> cur_is_article, in case we come up with a better method some day.

Or, we could just update the value once a day. :)

Actually, that reminds me: should we add a timestamp field to indicate
when cur_cache was last filled? A simple check of that against
cur_timestamp would have prevented our present cache-of-ancient-
version-is-displayed-instead-of-recent-one troubles.

It would then be possible to expire caches on certain pages, such as
those containing {{variables}}.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)