Current Schema
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Much of this page is based on earlier documentation by Peter Croome.
DB Column | Name in New Code | Description | Usage Notes |
---|---|---|---|
ID | id | DB-generated primary key. | In the lasso-based site, this is the number you see in URLs like http://www.comics.org/publisher_details.lasso?id=4066 It is generated by the database and has no inherent meaning. |
PubName | name | Name of the publisher, imprint, or set of imprints | Because imprints are not stored per-issue, in some cases a semicolon-separated list of imprints corresponding to all imprints used for a given series has been given an entry in this table. Also, not all things that we term "Publishers" or "Imprints" strictly fall into those categories, and we do not accurately reflect the evolution of company names over time (for instance, "DC" was not until fairly recently the official name of the company, although it was long an informal name. It is still not exactly correct- "DC Comics" appears to be the current legal name. But "DC" is what everyone knows, so that is what appears in the database). |
YearBegan | year_began | Year (by cover date) of first publication. | |
YearEnded | year_ended | Year (by cover date) of last publication, if any. | |
CountryID | country | The country from which the publisher operates. | Foreign key into the Countries table. |
Notes | notes | Space for arbitrary notes. | |
web | url | The URL for the publisher's website. | While this column sometimes has data, it does not appear to be used by the Lasso-based site. |
AlphaSortCode | alpha_sort_code | A single character. | Appears to be used to sort related publishers near each other even if the more obvious alphabetical sort would not do so. It's a touch unclear. |
ImprintCount | imprint_count | Count of how many imprints a given publisher has. | Does not appear to be uniformly accurate. |
BookCount | series_count | Count of how many series this publisher publishes. | Does not appear to be uniformly accurate. |
IssueCount | issue_count | Total number of issues in all series published by the publisher. | Does not appear to be uniformly accurate. |
Master | is_master | Boolean field. | Appears to indicate if something is a publisher or an imprint. Or more generally, a first-class publishing entity or one that is somehow part of a larger entity (because it was bought long ago, or is part of a group of companies commonly referred to by another name, etc). The new site mostly ignores this in favor of checking for rows with a matching parent id. |
Connection | connection | No clue. It's a varchar, though. Perhaps it's supposed to explain the nature of each publisher-to-publisher relationship? | Always null or in one case an empty string in the current data dump, so pretty clearly not used. |
ParentID | parent | Self-join key for parent/child relationships. | This is how the imprints for a publisher are stored. |
NextID | next | Self-join key, purpose unknown. | Does not appear to be in use. |
created | created | Row creation timestamp. | |
Modified | modified | One of two change timestamps. | No idea which one the Lasso site actually uses. |
Updated | updated | One of two change timestamps. | No idea which one the Lasso site actually uses. |