[turba] Question about database entries

[jonathan soong]

Just a question regarding db format,

what is the benefit of using an md5sum as the primary key and not just 
an auto_number ?

j

Michael Richey wrote:

>Thanks Jan, it worked perfectly.
>
>To anyone who wants to know how I generated the ID's:
>I couldn't use timestamp because I kept getting duplicates (script runs
>faster than the clock)...so I used /dev/urandom to generate the ID's
>
>I started with a comma separated list of
>senders_address,contact_name,contact_email and performed the following
>
>bash-2.05b$ for line in `cat addresses.list | sed s/^/","/g | sed s/"
>"/"_"/g`; do echo $line | sed s/^/`head -c6 /dev/urandom | md5sum | sed
>s/"  -"//g`/g >> modified.list ; done
>
>The above statement can be broken into several parts.
>first, sed s/^/","/g - inserts a comma at the beginning of the line
>second, sed s/" "/"_"/g - inserts an "_" wherever it fines a space
>next, sed s/^/`head -c6 /dev/urandom | md5sum | sed s/"  ="//g`/g -
>inserts a random number from /dev/urandom which has been md5summed and
>stripped of its trailing "  -" at the beginning of the line
>
>finally, it's all concatenated onto the end of modified.list
>
>With little effort, one can add quotes around each field and insert the
>proper statements to turn the whole shebang into an sql statement.
>
>When all was said and done, 3556 address book listings were imported
>into the database.
>
>Anyway, I hope this helps anyone in the same situation.
>
>Thanks again Jan, I continue to be impressed by the capabilities (and
>stability) of horde!  I'm setting it up on a separate server just see
>what I can make it do.
>
>Michael
>
>
>On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 06:37, Jan Schneider wrote:
>  
>
>>Zitat von Michael Richey <mike at strangehouse.com>:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>First of all, I'd like to congratulate the creators of horde and turba.
>>>I had previously implemented Squirrelmail, which is a fairly nice IMAP
>>>client...but then I found horde, imp and turba and I'm totally blown
>>>away.  Excellent job!
>>>      
>>>
>>Thanks!
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Ok, here's my question.  I'm using MySQL database back end for
>>>everything.  Turba assigns an ID for each address book object, and I'm
>>>wondering how these ID's are generated.
>>>      
>>>
>>They are just arbitrary unique IDs.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I've got several thousand address book entries for all of my users and
>>>am working on a method to import all of them at once.  I'm concerned
>>>about that ID though.  Is it special?  Will I let out the blue smoke if
>>>I just generate unique 32 character ID's based on timestamp?
>>>      
>>>
>>No, that's perfect.
>>
>>Jan.
>>
>>--
>>http://www.horde.org - The Horde Project
>>http://www.ammma.de - discover your knowledge
>>http://www.tip4all.de - Deine private Tippgemeinschaft
>>    
>>
>
>  
>