Database Schema

Introduction

There are three primary document views utilized by the ISFDB: showing the bibliography of an author, showing the titles present in a publication, and showing the publications in which a title was published. These views require three primary tables: authors, titles, and publications. Various normalization tables are provided to reduce errors and storage needs.

The illustration below shows the relationship between the various tables. All notes are stored in the notes table, which other tables refer to via the primary note_id key. The metadata table contains data pertinent to the database itself.

A high-level explanation of the database can be found in the Database Overview article. An out-of-date diagram of the ISFDB tables and their relationships can be found here.

Global Tables

Information stored in the global tables are shared across the title, author, and publication related tables in the ISFDB.

• Schema:directory - Author directory information.
• Schema:history - Tracks database change history.
• Schema:languages - List of all languages supported by the ISFDB. Must be kept in sync with LANGUAGES in common/isfdb.py.
• Schema:license_keys - User license key information.
• Schema:metadata - Metadata about the database itself.
• Schema:notes - General-purpose notes area.
• Schema:submissions - Data submissions.
• Schema:user_languages‎ - User Language preferences.
• Schema:user_preferences - User preferences.
• Schema:user_sites - User Website preferences.
• Schema:webpages - URLs of other Web sites. Used by authors, publishers, publication series, titles, series, award categories and award types.
• Schema:websites - Third party (bookseller and bibliographic) sites that a publication may link to based on its ISBN.

MediaWiki/User Tables

The ISFDB uses MediaWiki software to run its Wiki. See this MediaWiki chart for lists of table fields. The following MediaWiki pages are also used by the ISFDB software:

• mw_page - Information about all Wiki pages. Used by the nightly cleanup reports to find Wiki-ISFDB mismatches.
• mw_user‎ - User ID, name and other user-specific information. The version in publicly available backups has been cleansed of all private data.
• mw_user‎_group - Includes the Wiki group (editors, moderators/sysops or bureaucrats) to which each user belongs.

Author-Related Tables

The following tables are used to store information about authors and their works:

• Schema:authors - Contains information about an author.
• Schema:canonical_author - Links author records to title records.
• Schema:emails - Specialized table for storing email addresses.
• Schema:pseudonyms - Table of pseudonyms.
• Schema:pub_authors - Links author records to publication records.

Publication-Related Tables

The following tables are used to store information about publications:

• Schema:magazine - Contains magazine information. Unused.
• Schema:pub_content - Links title records to a specific publication.
• Schema:pub_series - Contains information on a publication series.
• Schema:publishers - Contains publisher information.
• Schema:pubs - Contains information on a specific publication.
• Schema:reference - Contains information on verification references.
• Schema:verification - Contains verification information for a specific publication.

Title-Related Tables

The following tables are used to store information about titles:

• Schema:series - Contains series information.
• Schema:tag_mapping - Links a tags entry to a specific title per user.
• Schema:tags - Contains user-defined title tags.
• Schema:title_relationships - Maps relationship between a review, serial, or translations to a title.
• Schema:titles - Contains information about a specific title.
• Schema:votes - Tracks votes for a specific title per user.

Awards-Related Tables

The following tables are used to store information about awards:

• Schema:award_cats - Contains information about award categories.
• Schema:award_types - Contains information about award types.
• Schema:awards - Contains award information.
• Schema:title_awards - Links award records to their related title records.

Transliteration Tables

• Schema:trans_authors - Transliterated canonical names for authors
• Schema:trans_legal_names - Transliterated legal names for authors
• Schema:trans_pub_series - Transliterated names for publication series
• Schema:trans_publisher - Transliterated names for publishers
• Schema:trans_puba - Transliterated titles for publications
• Schema:trans_titles - Transliterated titles for title records

Data Cleanup Tables

• Schema:bad_images - Publication IDs with suspect images
• Schema:cleanup - Record IDs in need of review and potential cleanup
• Schema:missing_author_urls - Author mismatches between ISFDB and other sites (SFE3 only at this time)