Adrian, what you described, along with the field type concept in CCK, makes for a nice CCK 2.0 where the actual data can be normalized. Add to this a great AJAX in-browser graphical schema editor, relations and your views proposal, and we're getting pretty darn close to the system I've been hoping Drupal would become :-) -Robert Adrian Rossouw wrote:
I've actually been thinking ..
we now have db_add_column for updates ... would it not make sense to introduce :
function db_create_table($name, $columns = array("col" => "type")) {
and of course db_create_index.
From an install system perspective, it might be really useful to actually keep a catalog of what tables are created by drupal itself, and it would help us be able to manage things like shared tables directly from Drupal.
We might even be able to automatically generate some of the updates / schemas. ie: when someone commits a new .install file, it dry runs the _install function and then sees if any columns / tables have been added , and then creates _update_<x> stub functions for that automatically.