Status Report

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under Site News |

Things are moving along here. I am doing quite a bit better job of keeping up with new account requests, additions and edits to the database, and answering/posting emailed questions. I know everyone appreciates that, as who wants to feel as if their email has disappeared into a black hole?

On the development front, I am making (slow) progress on moving everything over to the new code. The codebase itself is complete, and all that remains is the database work and the prettying up of things.

As far as the database migration, quite a bit is actually done; all of the ’support’ tables (e.g. Countries, Types, Cuts, Constituent Tobaccos) are moved over and working well. The Brands are also moved, as well as the newly separate Manufacturers table, and the Users table is almost completely moved, though I have not yet extensively tested it yet.

That leaves the Blends table and the Reviews table to move. The Reviews table cannot move until it has both Blends and Users to match up to in the new db, so it is waiting for the Blends to be finished.

I have been working on getting the Blends table moved for what seems like an eternity. It was in this table that I made so many of the bad design decisions I have talked about. Undoing them without simply scrapping tons of content in it (e.g. the Blenders) has been painstaking to the point of being forensic.

I have found a way to preserve the Blenders for each Blend in every case in which that field actually refers to a human being instead of a company, and will be able to port them directly.

*** Database Geekiness Follows ***

The current bad design decision I am wrestling with is the relationship between the Blend and the contents of that blend (the constituent tobaccos). I made a poor decision to store that information in the database as a string instead of a relationship and rely on the scripting language to handle parsing that string and retrieving the actual contents. Oops. Now that I have seen the error of my ways, I have to correct that oversight in the Source database in order to be able to import the relationships properly.

This is proving to not be an easy feat for me, so if there is anyone reading with a working knowledge of Visual Basic (or a slightly advanced knowledge of SQL) I would love to have someone answer some questions about it. Otherwise I will continue doing as I have done; learning as I go.

I’m off to wrestle with the beast. I just thought you’d like to know how things were progressing.

Comments

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4 Comments »

Comment by Jon Tillman

2008-03-18 15:06:27

UPDATE: I figured out the Visual Basic needed to do the split strings into records magic. Now on to using VB to create the new table to split it into. Wish me luck!

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Comment by Steve

2008-03-19 07:51:21

Good luck, Jon, and thanks for all your hard work. Tobacco Reviews dot com is a wonderful resource.

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Comment by Toby

2008-03-20 00:04:03

I agree with Steve! Where would we be without you, man?

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Comment by Phil Sauer

2008-04-27 09:07:47

Jon, I can help with the database questions, if you still have them. If you’re still wrestling with this issue, send a message with any questions (with supporting detail) to the above e-mail address and we’ll see if we can’t get you up and running asap.

Thanks for a great site — in spite of what you perceive as problems.