About wq.db's Design Patterns

About wq.db's Design Patterns

wq.db.patterns

To promote long term sustainability in data management projects, wq.db includes a design pattern framework that facilitates the creation of flexible database layouts.

The design patterns generally follow a schema similar to the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. EAV-style data models are part/icularly useful for building field data collection apps where the parameters being collected may change over time. To add new parameter definitions, a project administrator can use a web interface (add rows), instead of needing to have a developer change the database schema (add columns).

For an in-depth discussion of EAV and the related ERAV data model, see Capturing Quality: Retaining Provenance for Curated Volunteer Monitoring Data. The vera project provides an implementation of ERAV, which has better support than EAV for time series and tracking multiple versions of data.

The design patterns framework is provided via wq.db.patterns. See Advanced Patterns for more information.

Included Generic Patterns

In wq.db 1.0 and earlier, wq.db.patterns also included several generic EAV-style patterns out of the box. However, we found domain-specific models (like vera) invariably tend to be more useful in real-world applications. Thus, with the exception of wq.db.patterns.identify, all of the generic patterns have been removed as of wq.db 1.1. Some of these may be resurrected as standalone libraries if needed.