Part III. WACS Database Schema

This is the Database Schema Reference Manual, or data dictionary, for the WACS environment. This documents the database tables in use, their contents, structure, relationships and assigned values.

The WACS database schemas are built with the convention that the first letter of the schema name is prefixed to all fields within that schema. Thus a field from the sets schema will start with the letter s, a field from the assoc schema will start with the letter a and so on. Generally relationed fields will have fundamentally the same name, such that the set number is setno in the sets schema, asetno in the assoc schema, tsetno in the tags schema, dsetno in the download schema, and so on. This makes performing relational joins much easier and more portable since one can do the likes of where amodelno = modelno without any ambiguity and without having to specify the table name explicity.

Where possible fields with a limited set of possible values will be single character fields with a reasonably neumonic value for each possible value. Thus the media type (stype, dtype, etc) is V for Video Clip, I for Image Set, D for DVD scene, and so on. A lookup hash of the legal values will typically be available for programmers to use from the core Wacs module (see the Part II, “WACS API Programming Reference” for more details).