Spelunking is another term for caving - according to
Wikipedia, the British also call it potholing (Really?). I often relate the idea of discovering what may lie ahead in an underground cave to the effort of discovering what exist in a new database and related tables. I also like the name - Spelunking! But then again people have often said I was “different”.
With the release of DotNetNuke Version 5.3, the database has two table groups centered around the ContentItems and Taxonomy_Terms tables.
Let look at the Taxonomy tables first. The taxonomy tables define the categorization of terms into various Vocabularies. The vocabularies can be either lists or trees. The support for the different organization of vocabularies is maintained in the table structure. From a database point of view rather straight forward data storage for a define purpose.
However, the other tables based on the ContentItems seem a little different. The ContentItems table maintains information regarding the various tabs and modules on the site. (Remember that in the database the use of tab is equivalent to page and for historical reasons the page id’s are called tabid.)
So you will find information about pages and the modules on the pages. However the table structure is open ended in that the content type is defined in a support table – currently there is only two types defined – tabs and modules. So is it possible that additional content may be defined in the ContentItems table in the future – or in the PE version of DotNetNuke?
Also of interest in the ContentItems table are two columns – ContentKey and Indexed. Neither of these fields seems to be used at the moment. The ContentKey is a nvarchar value that could possibly contain the explicit key reference to a part of a modules data – say a blogid? The indexed field is a bit value so it is either 0 or 1. Could this information be indexed by the Search engine? This seems not to be the case in the current version of the Community Edition of DotNetNuke.
Lastly, there is a link between the two table groups – the table Content_tags maintains a reference to Taxonomy_Terms for ContentItems of type Tab (aka Page). So you will be able to search for pages based on a selected taxonomy term -- soon?.
Aslo of note is a subtle change in the database naming convention. Underscores are now appearing in the database table names. Nothing wrong with that – it’s just “different”.
Paul.