[1033] in IS Home Pages
Support Sheet main listing should be much quicker now
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin M. Cunningham)
Mon Mar 6 13:03:52 2000
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Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2000 13:03:43 -0500
To: is-home@mit.edu
From: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@MIT.EDU>
Howdy team,
Just a quick note regarding a change I made to the Product Support Sheets:
In order to speed up the lookup of supported Mac or Windows software, I added a new static indexed field to the database that summarizes whether any versions of each product are supported. The "supported products" lookup now keys off this new field, rather than caluclating the information in realtime, making the list of products come up much faster now -- did you nitice? (Previously, the lookup depended on a dynamic unindexed field, which took a long time to calculate and hence forced a long wait before the product list would be shown.) Adding or dropping products from the list is a relatively rare event and so I've opted to put in a static field that we can recalculate on some regular interval, not live.
One downside: previously, if we changed version information for a product, the product list would be updated to reflect this. Now, we have to manually update the new field before the list will reflect a change. (Note that I'm only talking about *whether* a product is listed -- the actual version information shown on the products page is still represented correctly and up-to-date.)
So if you find yourself saying, "Hey, I just added a new product but it isn't being reflected on the supported products list yet!" or "I just downgraded that product version from supported to unsupported and the product is still showing up!", remember that it is due to this new speedier lookup field. The overall products list won't list the correct products again until someone (Kris or me) updates this special new field. (I'll give Kris more details offline.)
In the future, I will create some scripts that will assure that the special field is automatically updated when you make a change in the database. That way we can keep searching on a static indexed field (for swift lookups on the web), but reflect changes in the database without manual intervention.
--Kevin
