[CT] QOA Registration

Daniel Moran dkm_1 at pacbell.net
Thu Feb 14 21:06:16 PST 2002


Registration is up and running on QOA. You still can't _do_ anything, but 
you can register if you want to. :-)

This is a stupid thing to be pleased about, but I am pleased about it. 
Launch spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars writing 
login/registration procedures; I sat in meetings that ran for hours and had 
the top guys at Launch in it as well -- they had so many different 
registration scripts at various times that at least a third of their "2 
million registered users," by my guess, were people who'd registered and 
then re-registered because they lost their account info.

It took me 3 days to write that registration module, but it's a better 
registration than Launch had, with fewer tables. (I've spent years now 
preaching at web companies as to how they should write their databases; I 
rewrote Popcast's db and went from 70+ tables down to about 20. So far 
there are only 8 on QOA --

Entity (individuals, groups, companies)
EntityLogin (Pseudo-one-to-one relationship with Entity, holding Login info 
for individuals only)
Entity_Entity_Map (maps entities to one another -- for example, if 
Fleetwood Mac is a group, and Stevie Nicks is an individual, 
Entity_Entity_Map maps Nicks as a member of Fleetwood Mac.)
Entity_Works_Map (many-to-many, maps entities to works)
Works (quotes, posts, novels, songs, movies ... fundamentally, any work 
produced by an entity.)
Works_Works_Map (many-to-many, maps works to one another; you could map a 
short story into a collection, or a song into an album.)
Lookup (lists various lookup values)
LookupGroup (Parent of Lookup; lists the groups for lookup values -- a 
LookupGroup might be "States" -- the Lookup values would be each of the 50 
states.)

There are two tables that aren't actually in use yet; Ratings & 
WorkCategories. WorkCategories is a true child of Works; Ratings is a 
pseudo-many-to-many reffing Entities and Works; at least in theory you can 
rate either one.

I'm pleased. For over a decade I've been walking around chanting "Minimize 
structure, minimize code" to the DBAs working for me; but I don't think 
I've ever done it myself as elegantly as I'm managing to do it with QOA.
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