RE: spoon-discuss: So, what should I be doing?

["Jonathan Van Matre" <JVanMatre@xxxxxxxx>]

While we're on the subject of improvements, I'm curious about how you've structured the database.  Being a DBA by day, I might be able to offer some suggestions in that area, both to improve performance, and possibly add a handy way to enable the intra-page links.

Can you dump CREATE TABLE scripts for the tables and send them my way?  If you're really feeling the Copious Free Time, a TOP 10 * result set from each table would be handy as well.

--Scoff!



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David E. Smith [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 11:55 PM
> To: spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: spoon-discuss: So, what should I be doing?
> 
> 
> On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Donald Whytock wrote:
> 
> > Were I to be greedy...
> 
> Indeed. ;)
> 
> > I'd want more intrapage links, so that if r123 references r234, the
> > reference to r234 would be a link to r234, so that I can 
> flip back and
> > forth between the two rules.
> 
> I'd want something like that too, actually. :-)
> 
> I'm a bit short for good ideas on how to implement it, though.
> 
> There are two really obvious ideas:
> 
> * Go through the whole ruleset and edit everything by hand. I 
> don't really
> want to do that, because the ruleset is up to about 40 pages. (Yeah, I
> printed it out.)
> 
> * Find a way to do it at runtime. Really tricky... It's hard 
> for software
> to distinguish between "Rule 100" and "starts with 100 points" in any
> meaningful way.
> 
> If you're just looking for meaningful groupings of rules, just suggest
> more keywords. Since I now have the authority to add Keywords to the
> database more-or-less at my discretion, and since it's really 
> really easy
> to do, that may have to suffice as a stopgap.
> 
> > Maybe an alphabetized rule name index at the beginning of 
> the rule list.
> 
> That would be relatively easy to do... I'll try to bang one out.
> 
> > Definitely a place for Limbo above or below the Grid, 
> because, thanks
> > to football, things being in (1,1) may become an issue.
> 
> Definitely in the queue.
> 
> I may end up re-doing the whole Grid system again at some point. The
> system I've got now is fairly good for most things that occur
> infrequently, but moving those Gremlins around for GremBall 
> is frankly a
> pain in the ass.
> 
> > BTW, a thought about the database...Do you store the actual text of
> > objects in the database, or is that stored in files that are
> > referenced by the database?  Which do you think would be less of a
> > resource drain: hauling lots of text out of the database, or opening
> > several text files in succession?
> 
> The rules are stored in one big database table.
> 
> Though I haven't formally benchmarked anything like this, I 
> imagine the
> "lots of text files" would be more draining. PHP and MySQL 
> offer lots of
> stuff to make database use reasonably efficient - persistent 
> connections,
> a fair amount of internal caching, etc. And there's the less-tangible
> benefit of the fact that everything is already IN the database.
> 
> Rules, proposals, and CFJs are all stored in one big table 
> that has the
> object number and revision number, object type, title, text, 
> other stuff
> (nweek of origin, "owner" for proposals, and so on). Since 
> every revision
> of every object is stored as a separate row, there's a total 
> of 557 items
> already in there.
> 
> If you want to look at the current rules, you can either:
> * Make a couple quick queries and iterate through the result set
> or
> * Open up several hundred text files and start parsing like a madman.
> (There's 217 items in the database with type "rule", but that 
> includes all
> previous revisions of rules. I'm too tired to count up all the current
> revisions right now.)
> 
> The database also has tables for players, the grid, dimensions, and
> keywords. Most of those are fairly self-explanatory.
> 
> ..dave
> 
> 
>