[Koha-devel] Primary key does not exist !!!!!!!

[paul POULAIN]

Hi everybody,

This is my 1st message on this list.
I'm a new developper of koha. Coming from france.
I've almost a half time job to work on koha to help reaching the 1.2 
version, with MARC support.
When it will be done, we will use it here, in france, in at least 4 
libraries with 80 000 books (christian libraries).

Presently I'm working on admin tool to administer avery parameter table. 
It should be released on CVS soon.

My fisrt post is to CRY because of a BIG proble in the DB structure:
In most tables there is no primary key defined.
On some of them there are indexes, but no pk.

It's very, very dirty, ugly, infamous, ridiculous (and every -y or -ous 
term you could find ;-)) from a theoric point of vue,
It's the source of perf caveats, (joins make heavy use of primary key. 
In fact, almost every "join" are usually on a pk of the right part of 
the expression)
It's the cause of some bugs in a practical point of vue : it's not 
possible to use "append" sql command, which is VERY practical when you 
have to store datas (the same form is shares for insert and modify 
actions...)

So, unless there is a very important reason to do so (and I don't know 
what could be such a reason...), I think a primary key must be defined 
for every table in the DB...

Who can include them in the db schema ? If you want a SQL patch to 
correct the DB, I should be able to spend a few hours to do it.

Note : for a 1st post, it may seem to be very critic. As you will see 
later, I'm usually a happy man ;-))))) It's just that I've work a lot on 
many DB (mySQL, Interbase, Informix...) and I'm very surprised with this 
problem. I don't blame anybody.
--
Paul