[wplug-internet] Membership Database design

[Joe Prostko]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 6:34 AM, John Lewis <oflameo2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> That said I don't think it is a good idea to reduce this to just one
> table because Just as Pat said there is no guarentee that every contact
> has a membership associated with them.

Using multiple tables does likely make more sense, simply because we may
make other categories of users and be tracking things outside of
membership.  It's probably better to plan ahead for such a thing instead of
having to worry about overhauling things at a later day due to a choice
that was too constraining (and would result in an unmanageable amount of
columns).  That said, a single table could still easily work for the
current use case with proper WHERE clause logic (checking for NULL/IS NOT
NULL values in certain column(s), or checking a column that flags if
somebody is a member or not, for instance).  I suppose it could get
trickier if somebody was a former member though, as you would then have to
do date comparisons (MySQL makes that easy though), or else rely on the
binary flagging method.

In any case, two tables definitely works, so let's do that.  :)

> I see if I can make a database in sqlite3 that auto creates an auto
> incrementing primary key. If I can and it make sense, I will post it
> here. Then I will rewrite it for mariadb, post that here and then commit
> it to wplug.org's mariadb so we can move on to the PHP part so we can
> finish a project. I can go ahead and prepopulate the database with all
> of the data from the spreadsheet if requested.

Honestly, we could simply use SQLite for this, most likely.  It seems we
have the necessary PHP modules already enabled from my quick check.  I
usually use MySQL (or variants like MariaDB or Percona), simply because
phpMyAdmin is such a nice tool for those times when you don't want to mess
around with the DB directly.  I don't think we actually have it installed
though, so using SQLite would be just as easy, currently.  Database backups
would be easy too, for obvious reasons.  I guess it depends if we'd like to
integrate this fully with the wiki or not, or if we want to it to act more
standalone.

- joe
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