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SQL Schema and Graphs/Maps

18 Mar

A while ago I wrote about my auto-query generator project. I only just recently got around to finishing it up because other things had higher priority, and also because I wasn’t entirely convinced that I was doing things the bes way, and I wanted to take some time to experiment.

Matt sat down with me and analyzed the problem, and we decided that we could use the schema to create a graph with all of the edges (our ID columns are consistently named in each table), and then use a shortest-path-finding algorithm, and then I could write a SQL generator that works off of the path. Getting all of the IDs in our tables in MySQL is pretty easy:
SELECT DISTINCT COLUMN_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE '%ID'

Then getting all the tables for a given ID:
SELECT TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_KEY FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME = '$id'
AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'yourschemahere'

From that information, I simply built a graph which I represented with an adjacency map.

Unfortunately, that did not work. The path finding algorithm was basically too good, finding paths that were the shortest, but not necessarily the correct way to get from one table to another. For example, two tables might contain a GenreID, but maybe they are actually linked by ArtistID. Ok, so what about only making an edge when that column is a primary key in one of the nodes representing a table? That wasn’t hard to do, either, but it still gave wrong results in some cases. Sometimes it’s just more efficient (but wrong) to route through the Genres table than go the right way.

I considered making a directed graph so that connections would only be one-way to the table with the ID as a primary key, but I realized that wouldn’t work either, because sometimes you do need to join tables based in IDs that are not primary keys. Essentially, our schema does not completely represent the full complexity of the relationships that it contains.

So I went back to my original method, which was to map out the paths by hand. Tedious though it may have been, it’s still a pretty clever solution, in my opinion.

I created two maps. The first simply says “if you have this ID, and you are trying to get to this table, start at this other table,” for every possible ID, and the next one simply says “if you’re at this table, and you’re trying to get to this other table, here is the next table you need to go through.”

The great thing about this is that most of those steps can be reused, but I only had to create them once. For example, it’s always true that to get from Users to Files you must go through UsersFiles, no matter what your starting point is, although you may be trying to find all of the Songs, Albums or Artists that a user has in their library.

Having spelled things out this way, there is no guesswork for a path finding algorithm, because there is literally only one path. In fact it hardly counts as a path finder or an algorithm; it just iterates through the map until it reaches its destination. And it works. I will post as many details as I’m allowed about exactly how the actual SQL building algorithm works, and about how I am able to merge multiple paths, so for example you can have an ArtistID and a PlaylistID to get all of the artists on a given playlist. Stay tuned.

 
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