Extension:Education Program/schema

This page describes the database schema used by the Education Program extension from a high level perspective. Documentation on individual fields can be found in the schema file at sql/EducationProgram.sql.

Relational, denormalized and revision storage
The extension keeps up to 3 copies of the same data, each optimized for a particular purpose.


 * Relational storage is the data in it's canonical form. All other copies of the data are computed from this. This data can be found in some of the fields of the main tables.


 * Denormalized storage is the data in a format optimized for doing queries against. It is always computed from the relational storage data. This data can be found in some of the fields of the main tables.


 * Revision storage is the ep_revisions table which contains blobs with the relational data for one particular object.

The extension uses the DBDataObject and DBTable classes for virtually all it's database interaction. These have mechanisms for distinguishing between relational and denormalized data (referred to as "summary data" in their docs). All revisioning work is done through EPRevision and EPRevisions using EPRevisionedObject.

Institutions
Institutions are stored in the ep_orgs table. You can get the linked courses via the org_courses field, which is an array with course IDs and is a denormalized field.

Courses
Courses are stored in ep_courses. They are linked to their institution via the course_org_id field, which is a foreign key on ep_orgs.org_id.

You can find linked users (students, instructors, ambassadors) via the ep_users_per_course table. This table contains the users id, the course id and an integer indicating the role the user has.

Articles
Students can associate themselves with articles they are working on. These are stored in the ep_articles table. It contains a course id, a user id and a page id (foreign key on page.page_id), which can be used to get all articles worked on by a course, a student, or a combination of both.

Students
Students are stored in the ep_students table. The students table can be through of as an "extension" to the user table. It has a user_id field, which is a foreign id on user.user_id and several other fields with student data. This is mostly denormalized data though, so this tables primary use is getting lists of students (or linked data) in a computational sane fashion.

Ambassadors and instructors
Like students, each of these roles have their own tables, which can be thought of as extensions to the user table:


 * ep_instructors
 * ep_oas (Online Ambassdaors)
 * ep_cas (Campus Ambassdaors)

The ambassador tables contain ambassador profile info. The instructor table is currently not used.