[Netarchivesuite-devel] Programmatical updates to the data model

[Nicolas Giraud]

Well yes, but I also think that a programmatical update makes things
simpler. Only having it as a separate program would be better, because that
way DBAs could set up a special user with custom privileges, without
compromising security.

Nicolas

2011/3/25 Mikis Seth Sørensen <mss at statsbiblioteket.dk>

> Hi Nicolas
>
> I've talked a bit with Søren about this issue.
>
> The initial implementation of the updating of databases in the NAS project
> was to use sql scripts directly, but this was replaced by the programmatical
> approach to the database migration to simplify the upgrade process. We would
> therefore very much like to keep the application initiated update of the
> database, to avoid complication of the install procedure for our operations
> people.
>
> That said, I think that a programmatical initiate database update could be
> combined with a upgrade definition specified in sql scripts. Then our need
> for an automatic database upgrade on application startup could be addressed
> by calling the sql scripts from the application code.
>
> This would mean a NAS installation could chose between 2 database upgrade
> strategies:
>
>    - Manual database upgrade by running the migration script by a user
>    with administrative priviliges.
>    - Automatic database database upgrade, where the application runs the
>    same scripts.
>
> Could this be a solution?
> ~Mikis
>
>
> From: Nicolas Giraud <nikokode at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: "netarchivesuite-devel at lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk" <
> netarchivesuite-devel at lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk>
> Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:31:53 +0100
> To: "netarchivesuite-devel at lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk" <
> netarchivesuite-devel at lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk>
> Subject: [Netarchivesuite-devel] Programmatical updates to the data model
>
> Hi,
>
> I would like to get your opinion about the programmatic updates to the data
> model tables performed within NAS code (DBUtils#updateTable method called
> from DAO classes).
>
> My own opinion is that it is not a good design to have this code embedded
> in the applicative code, for security reasons. It turns out that in most
> organizations, database administrators are in charge of production databases
> and are very stringent about security. For that reason, an applicative user
> will never be granted privileges to alter a table or a schema, or create a
> table. These operations are generally performed by DBAs themselves, using
> administrative accounts with extended privileges. This is the case here at
> BnF, and was also the case in most of my previous assignments.
>
> We are currently putting 3.15 in production, and there have been changes to
> the datamodel. So rolling out this changes in production is painful, because
> the programmatic update code fails (the applicative DB user is not allowed
> to alter the DB schema), so I need everytime to manually create a script and
> forward it to the DBAs, who are not very happy with this "non-standard"
> course of events. So to be pretty honest, datamodel updates are currently a
> chore to roll out in production!
>
> I believe that many potential users of NetArchive Suite might have the same
> type of organization and also experience these difficulties. So in my
> opinion, should we keep a programmatic approach to maintaining the data
> model (which is all right in itself), it should be made as a separate
> application, so that DBAs might be able to use these tool themselves, or at
> least identify a special account with the proper privileges.
>
> What is your opinion about this matter ?
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Nicolas Giraud
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Développeur Archives du Web - Bibliothèque Nationale de France
> Web Archiving Developper - National Library of France
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Netarchivesuite-devel mailing list
> Netarchivesuite-devel at lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk
>
> https://lists.gforge.statsbiblioteket.dk/mailman/listinfo/netarchivesuite-devel
>
>


-- 
Nicolas Giraud
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Développeur Archives du Web - Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Web Archiving Developper - National Library of France
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ml.sbforge.org/pipermail/netarchivesuite-devel/attachments/20110325/776e7e72/attachment-0002.html>