Yes it can be done, but should it? I say no.

On Sep 3, 2020, at 9:54 AM, Glenn Glazer <glenn.glazer@...> wrote:



On 9/3/2020 09:39, Duane wrote:

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:14 AM, Chuck Palmer wrote:

I would think that somewhere in the back-end of groups.io is my profile that says what groups I am a member of, what my roles are in those groups, and which groups have donations turned on.

Let's see...  Let's say 100,000 groups, 5,000,000 accounts, at least 3 possible roles per account.  True, a computer can figure all that out, but it takes computing cycles to do it.  It would have to be an almost instantaneous status in order to be useful, like when someone starts a group and wants to upgrade immediately.  Seems like a terrible waste of resources to me, though I'm sure it could be done.  BTW, I doubt that many of my members (~7,000 total) even know the Billing item exists in their account and no one has ever asked about it.

So, I'm a software engineer for Second Life. We have over 2.6 million resident groups in our system and we provide realtime group information, include roles for a member.

The simple db schema for such a thing is to have a user table which has information about users, including a UUID for the user; a groups table that has information about groups including a group UUID and a roles table that has role information including a role UUID. Then, there is a simple mapping table that has rows consisting of tuples (userid,groupid,roleid) that is updated whenever someone joins, leaves or changes roles in the group. Then, retrieving the roles and groups for a user is a simple SELECT statement against the mapping table and decoding the group and role id's back to human readable strings by a secondary lookup. No "waste of resources" and yes, it is available instantaneously. A query of this kind, even including the subqueries for the strings returns in fractions of a second - yes cycles are used, but not an appreciable amount. This is, after all, what databases are built to do.

Best,

Glenn

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