<html><head></head><body>Greg, thanks for pointing this out. I hope you know I'm doing my best to meet the standards required for an import. I don't think it's very nice to imply that I'm trying to avoid the hard work and just do the fun part. <br>For this issue specifically I think your idea of updating the documentation to match your expectations would be best. That way future importers will know what will likely be expected. (Eg no foreign keys, etc. - Existing documentation seems to say that they are OK.)<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On October 9, 2022 5:38:56 AM MDT, Greg Troxel <gdt@lexort.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre dir="auto" class="k9mail"><br>jacob@cyptem.com writes:<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;"> * Handling future updates - Use UGRC:import_uuid tag to<br>maintain a unique identifier back to the original database. Later when<br>updating, skip rows with IDs that already exist.<br></blockquote><br>I'm really unclear on consensus about foreign keys. My impression is<br>that:<br><br> 1) generally people on the list think they shouldn't be used, almost to<br> the point of rough consensus<br><br> 2) everyone who is doing an import for the first time thinks they are<br> going to be useful later and wants to include them, even though the<br> first import is often "I only want to do the easy part" and none of<br> the difficult steps are implemented.<br><br> 3) People who understand how difficult the difficult steps are don't<br> see any real value in foreign keys in the database.<br><br>We have recent data for point 2 :-)<br><br>Does anybody think I'm off base about (1) and (3)? If not, maybe we<br>should adjust the import guidelines to say "no foreign keys". If so,<br>maybe we should say "a single foreign key is ok".<br><br>I don't think foreign keys are terrible, but I think they aren't that<br>useful and the combination of people not wanting to do the hard<br>matching/checking I recently outlined and wanting foreign keys is not a<br>good outcome -- we get the bloat without whatever benefit there might<br>be.<br><br></pre></blockquote></div></body></html>