The MythTV project does have people who understand databases quite well.sfatula wrote:Speaking of which.... Has anyone in the myth project considered using foreign keys and restraints in mariadb to prevent people from mucking up tables for the most part? Also has the side effect of catching program bugs as well.
In MythTV, all the business logic is in the code. There is a lot of business logic that would have to be examined to determine which can, and which can not (or would require refactoring, or schema changes) to be able to take advantage of any possible constraints and to utilize transactions.
However, since the MythTV database explicitly does not use a transactional engine, someone would likely first have to go through every existing use and fix the presumptions that exist (there were a couple of issues that were known to cause challenges (some could possibly be mitigated with careful tuning, some would possibly require code changes)) so that the various constraints can be properly applied inside a transaction.
If you are volunteering to reviewing all the code, and submit the (perhaps largish) set of (individually smallish) patches to move in the direction you are suggesting, I suspect your efforts will be welcomed (but yes, ask over on irc). If you are trying to suggest how others should spend their volunteer free time, well, I suspect not so much.
Like most large projects, MythTV has evolved. There is clearly room for improvement.
