Radical proposal for our own repository structure

[Paolo F Cantoni]

We maintain our own repository structure which is compatible with the standard installation.  We have tried to make the changes as minimal as we needed, for example, making column types and sizing as consistent as we could.

We need (for our own internal processes) to use 3 columns that currently are (always?) empty (as q mentions in his vademecum book - Always NULL ?!).  However, we need to index these columns and they are currently nvarchar(MAX).  nvarchar(MAX) columns in SQL Server cannot be indexed; so we are proposing to make them nvarchar(255) and then index them.

We don't believe this will cause any issues but we'd be interested in any thoughts.  We are interested in any potential "show stoppers"; we have no fear of the changes we're making, and we're not interested in "you won't have a standard installation", we haven't had one for over a decade and a half.

TIA,
Paolo

[qwerty]

Well, on you own risk... Those question marks just say that I don't know for sure. It's an empirical value. I don't think Sparx will give you any guarantee. Probably you already know all of that ;-) Curious who will chip in.

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

I think you're probably going to be allright.

I don't really see a potential showstopper.


Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Well, on your own risk... Those question marks just say that I don't know for sure. It's an empirical value. I don't think Sparx will give you any guarantee. Probably you already know all of that ;-) Curious who will chip in.

q.

We're looking at the "flag" columns:

StateFlags Always NULL ⁈
PackageFlags Always NULL ⁈
ActionFlags Always NULL ⁈


Actually, only two of these three will need to be converted (after some more design work).  I've checked two of our very large repositories and (as per your book), they are all NULL.


Paolo

[Geert Bellekens]

PackageFlags are definitely used if you want to enable version control.

Haven't used the other ones yet

Geert

[Modesto Vega]

I would be very, very careful. There are many NVARCHAR(MAX) columns in the repository, some of them are definitely use - e.g., StyleEx or PDATA2 to 5. I don't know about the ones your are referring to.

Silly question, but why aren't you using tags or a custom table extending the table you want to extend?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

PackageFlags are definitely used if you want to enable version control.

Haven't used the other ones yet

Geert

Are they used (as their name would suggest) for package objects only?  For our purposes, packages are not in scope, so we could coexist.

Since we don't use version control, they're all NULL for us.

Paolo

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I would be very, very careful. There are many NVARCHAR(MAX) columns in the repository, some of them are definitely used - e.g., StyleEx or PDATA2 to 5. I don't know about the ones your are referring to.

Silly question, but why aren't you using tags or a custom table extending the table you want to extend?

Don't want to do unnecessary joins.  We have very large repositories (and they'll get bigger). Since these are unused...

Paolo

[Paolo F Cantoni]

PackageFlags are definitely used if you want to enable version control.

Haven't used the other ones yet

Geert

Q, you may want to update your book!


Paolo

[qwerty]

Q, you may want to update your book!

Paolo

Will do so. Indeed I had not turned on VC when examining that flag.

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

to be clear, I was talking about t_package.PackageFlags

Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

to be clear, I was talking about t_package.PackageFlags

Geert

AndI was talking about t_object.PackageFlags   

Paolo

[Geert Bellekens]

to be clear, I was talking about t_package.PackageFlags

Geert

AndI was talking about t_object.PackageFlags   

Paolo

t_object.PackageFlags is always null on all of my models.
t_object.StateFlags is used when you right click on an object in a diagram and choose Advanced | Set Object State
t_object.ActionFlags is always null on all of my models as well

Geert

[qwerty]

In any case I will perform tests with VC turned on. The only pain is that I have to setup that ancient subversion again :-/

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

In any case I will perform tests with VC turned on. The only pain is that I have to setup that ancient subversion again :-/

q.

You can use Azure Devops (TFS) as well, but knowing your love for anything Microsoft I guess that won't be a better option?

Geert