Am 18.02.11 01:49, schrieb Nico Kadel-Garcia:
I worry about using the email address as the key, because it makes it very difficult to *preserve* a user's history across address changes. I like my GMail account, but I've had old Comcast or university accounts from which I submitted bugs to RHEL years ago. If I'm not mistaken, index management by numerical keys can often be significantly faster than by text keys.
I meant primary key not from a technical, but from a, hmmm, logical viewpoint. If we have double user names, like a "dan" in bugs.c.o and a "dan" on the website, it is not clear if that is the same user. If we have a "dan@example.com" in both dbs, but one has the username "dan", the other "smithd", we can be sure it is the same user.
That is just for the merge. How we address the database later is a completely different issue.
But as said, we are open for ideas :)
Ralph