[Opensim-dev] Changes to IAssetDataPlugin

[Stefan Andersson]

> I propose that we change to just having one "Store" method that
> replaces both the insert and update method, which will insert or
> update.  This is what we have in practice with MySQL, so this will
> just change the interface to match it.  My biggest concern would be
> breaking external data providers.

Since I was the one who painstakingly separated this into two methods, I'm
opposed to merging it, but won't fight it, so a 0 from me.

But:

It's a very common separation of context in most data workflows to clearly
separate Create from Update, and from a data integrity standpoint, you do
want to be able to trap re-inserts and updates of non-existent resources, as
these are indications something has gone wrong.

Although the above might come off as somewhat abstract, fact is that a
majority of data storage architectures enforce and rely on the separation,
forcing you to do an extra lookup before each operation if you throw the
semantics away. I did the separation just because the extra lookup was
causing pain. (Though this was like 1,5 years ago - much has happened since)

> When I mentioned this idea to Adam, he also mentioned changing the
> naming of the Fetch methods to Get, so that everything will be
> consistent.   I have an example of what this change would look like on
> this mantis entry:  http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=4015
> Any feedback or thoughts on this idea is greatly appreciated.

Even better would be introducing the TryGet pattern.

/Stefan