Stored routines library for MariaDB to create, read and manage tags for users.
MariaDB and MySQL do not support comments for certain types of objects. In particular, MariaDB does not support comments for users and roles.
If in the future MariaDB will support comments for users and roles, it will probably
do it in a non-standard, dangerous way. While most other DBMSs support the COMMENT ON
statement,
MariaDB and MySQL support a COMMENT clause for some CREATE and ALTER statements.
Using ALTER statements to change a comment is potentially risky.
While MySQL has a COMMENT clause
for CREATE USER and ALTER USER, it also has an ATTRIBUTE clause which accepts a JSON document. This allows to insert semi-structured information. While this can potentially be
useful when attributes are handled by programs, for humans it is difficult to read
and modify manually JSON documents. This can easily lead to mistakes.
SQL Server supports extended properties. A set of stored procedures allows to associate properties to any object, and easily read or manage them. This solution works equally well for programs and humans.
This library is partly inspired by SQL Server properties. However, this solution specifically applies to users and roles. This allows us to focus on what is needed to associate complex information to users.
This library understands the idea of tag hierarchy. For example, to store multiple contacts for users, it might be convenient to use tags like these:
contact.emailcontact.phonecontact.im.telegramcontact.im.skype
usertag has been tested on:
- MariaDB 10.11 LTS
- MariaDB 10.6 LTS
- Percona Server 8.0
- MySQL 8.0
No plugins required.
No configuration requirements.
To install usertag, just run the usertag.sql file on the MariaDB server.
If you use the MariaDB CLI, you can do it in this way:
mariadb -c -A < usertag.sql
Or, with MariaDB versions older than 10.4:
mysql -c -A < usertag.sql
If you use any other tool to install this library, it is your responsibility to
remove the DELIMITER statement if necessary.
Refer to the tutorial.sql file for a practical explanaiton by example.
Copyright: Vettabase Ltd, 2023
This work is licensed under a GNU General Public License, version 3.