Re: table versioning approach (not auditing)

Hey
 
yes i'm adding an additional key to each of my tables. First i wanted to use the primary key as one column in my audit_log table, but in some of my tables the PK consists of more than one column. Plus it's nice to have one key that is called the same over all tables.
 
To get a former state for one row at date x I need to join the latest delta BEFORE date x with each delta AFTER date x. If I would log complete rows, this joining part would not be neccessary, but as I usually work with spatial databases that have complex geometries and also image files, this strategy is too harddisk consuming.
 
If there are more users following a similar approach, I wonder why we not throw all the good ideas together, to have one solution that is tested, maintained and improved by more developpers. This would be great.
 
Felix
 

Gesendet: Montag, 29. September 2014 um 23:25 Uhr
Von: "Abelard Hoffman" <abelardhoffman@gmail.com>
An: "Felix Kunde" <felix-kunde@gmx.de>
Cc: "pgsql-general@postgresql.org" <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Betreff: Re: [GENERAL] table versioning approach (not auditing)

Thank you Felix, Gavin, and Jonathan for your responses.
 
Felix & Jonathan: both of you mention just storing deltas. But if you do that, how do you associate the delta record with the original row? Where's the PK stored, if it wasn't part of the delta?
 
Felix, thank you very much for the example code. I took a look at your table schemas. I need to study it more, but it looks like the way you're handling the PK, is you're adding a separate synthethic key (audit_id) to each table that's being versioned. And then storing that key along with the delta.
 
So then to find all the versions of a given row, you just need to join the audit row with the schema_name.table_name.audit_id column. Is that right? The only potential drawback there is there's no referential integrity between the audit_log.audit_id and the actual table.
 
I do like that approach very much though, in that it eliminates the need to interrogate the json data in order to perform most queries.
 
AH
 
 
 
On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 12:26 AM, Felix Kunde <felix-kunde@gmx.de> wrote:Hey
 
i've also tried to implement a database versioning using JSON to log changes in tables. Here it is: https://github.com/fxku/audit[https://github.com/fxku/audit]
I've got two versioning tables, one storing information about all transactions that happened and one where i put the JSON logs of row changes of each table. I'm only logging old values and not complete rows.
 
Then I got a function that recreates a database state at a given time into a separate schema - either to VIEWs, MVIEWs or TABLES. This database state could then be indexed in order to work with it. You can also reset the production state to the recreated past state.
 
Unfortunately I've got no time to further work on it at the moment + I have not done tests with many changes in the database so I can't say if the recreation process scales well. On downside I've realised is that using the json_agg function has limits when I've got binary data. It gets too long. So I'm really looking forward using JSONB.

There are more plans in my mind. By having a Transaction_Log table it should be possible to revert only certain transactions. I'm also thinking of parallel versioning, e.g. different users are all working with their version of the database and commit their changes to the production state. As I've got a unique history ID for each table and each row, I should be able to map the affected records.

Have a look and tell me what you think of it.

Cheers
Felix
 

Gesendet: Montag, 29. September 2014 um 04:00 Uhr
Von: "Abelard Hoffman" <abelardhoffman@gmail.com>
An: "pgsql-general@postgresql.org" <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Betreff: [GENERAL] table versioning approach (not auditing)

Hi. I need to maintain a record of all changes to certain tables so assist in viewing history and reverting changes when necessary (customer service makes an incorrect edit, etc.).
 
I have studied these two audit trigger examples:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger]
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger_91plus
 
I've also read about two other approaches to versioning:
1. maintain all versions in one table, with a flag to indicate which is the current version
2. have a separate versions table for each real table, and insert into the associated version table whenever an update or insert is done.
 
My current implementation is based on the wiki trigger examples, using a single table, and a json column to record the row changes (rather than hstore). What I like about that, in particular, is I can have a "global," chronological view of all versioned changes very easily.
 
But there are two types of queries I need to run.
1. Find all changes made by a specific user
2. Find all changes related to a specific record
 
#1 is simple to do. The versioning table has a user_id column of who made the change, so I can query on that.
 
#2 is more difficult. I may want to fetch all changes to a group of tables that are all related by foreign keys (e.g., find all changes to "user" record 849, along with any changes to their "articles," "photos," etc.). All of the data is in the json column, of course, but it seems like a pain to try and build a query on the json column that can fetch all those relationships (and if I mess it up, I probably won't generate any errors, since the json is so free-form).
 
So my question is, do you think using the json approach is wrong for this case? Does it seem better to have separate versioning tables associated with each real table? Or another approach?
 
Thanks
 
 

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