[Opensim-dev] Uniqueness in MySQL useraccounts ('Name' field)

[Kevin Buckley]

I have a question/request which was being discussed on the Opensim Users
list and Justin suggested it might be better handled here?

 

As a developer of an Opensim member/user system I need to maintain the
attribute that the combination of FirstName and LastName is unique within an
individual Opensim implementation.

 

To achieve that, on a server which supports multiple, concurrent signups,
the best way is to have a unique, composite key in the useraccounts table
which includes FirstName and LastName and then trap MySQL error 1062
(duplicate entry) when attempting to create a new user record.  This avoids
the situation where the code checks for uniqueness in step-1 and then, if it
satisfies that, writes the new user record in step-2; with the risk that
another process writes a duplicate record between those steps.

 

There are other ways to deal with this but they introduce their own issues
and they're not as efficient as the method above.

 

The Opensim setup process already goes to the trouble of creating such a
composite key, called 'Name'.  However, it doesn't give it the UNIQUE
attribute.

 

So, currently (as an easy fix and to avoid having to remember to manually
edit the database index every time I upgrade Opensim) my code forces 'Name'
to be UNIQUE every time a new user subscribes.  But clearly this is a large
and mostly pointless overhead as it actually only needs to do it once.

 

So my question/request is: is it possible to modify subsequent Opensim
releases so that 'Name' is given the UNIQUE attribute by default (probably a
one line code change I imagine)?

 

I can't see any downside to this and, unless I'm missing something, it seems
a logical thing to do?

 

Kevin

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