DB schema

[Shane Kerr]

All,

I've had a quick look over the proposed DB schema, and have the
following comments/suggestions/questions:

o Please please please don't use HANDLE to represent the key for the
  objects.  You should really think about using an internal identifier
  as the key.  You can/should still make HANDLE a unique field, but
  users use this to encode information (company name, network city
  location, whatever), and as such want to change it.  This process is
  much simplier with a distinct, internal-only, key.

o Why isn't address stored in a seperate table like phone, mailbox, and
  so on?

o Can an organization or network have multiple parents?  If not, perhaps
  it might make more sense to include a "parent" attribute in the tables
  rather than use a seperate link table.

o You'll need to add an "ordering" attribute to the tables, to allow for
  stable sorting on the output.  For example, inaddr servers should
  appear in the order the user specifies, and contacts should probably
  also work this way.

o Why use start and number of AS rather than start-end for AS numbers?

o What's a "resource link"?

o What's a maintainer?  Please just kill this beast, or at least define
  it in a meaningful way.  :(

o What are you going to do about the gazillion non-CIDR networks that
  exist today?  There are a lot of networks in the ARIN database that
  are (for example) a /24 and the subsequent /25.  I suggest that you
  should store networks as start-end in the database, even if you remove
  this from the templates and/or web forms.  On output, you can convert
  to between 1 to 31 CIDR networks, but it's probably simplier to just
  store start-end ranges when storing the addresses.

o Am I the only one who hates templates?  ;)

Shane