Database table prefix support

[andresmazzo]

Actually it's required to have a dedicated database for huginn to not merge tables from other software systems.

Some cool foss projects like MediaWiki, Matomo, etc have an environment variable to set table prefix. I think it's something easy to provide and extremely useful for users that have multiple softwares and wants to have them in one database.

Mediawiki example: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgDBprefix

[dsander]

We are using the Ruby on Rails framework and it doesn't look like it has good support for using a global table prefix.

Normally our users create a dedicated database for Huginn which also makes backups a lot easier.

[andresmazzo]

Oh interesting. I didn't thought about framework limitations. Table prefix is useful for saas systems, having to deal with a significant amount of services for multiple clients/customers/orgs/etc.
I'm not a Ruby on Rails developer, but found that v5.2.3 has support:
https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/ModelSchema.html#method-c-table_name_prefix

[dsander]

Table prefix is useful for saas systems, having to deal with a significant amount of services for multiple clients/customers/orgs/etc.

Especially in that use case having one database per customer would be beneficial, otherwise one customer could read the data of another. Any reason why you can't use a separate database for Huginn?

[andresmazzo]

Sure i can and i did that like a workaround, but it makes more complex the setup because i have to create the db, config user permissions for this new db, etc.
I understand that maybe itsn't the most common use case, but it simplifies the installation and maintenance for big scenarios using code as infraestructure and other techniques for example.

[dsander]

I understand that it would be easier to set up in certain scenarios, but don't see one in which it is a good idea. Not sure if there are databases that support setting permissions on a table (prefix) level, but even if there is I think the required configuration of either creating a DB per Huginn instance or setting permissions per prefix sounds similar to me.

[andresmazzo]

Would be interesting to learn why softwares like Matomo, MediaWiki, Gitea, Yourls and others support it. I really don't know if there is a "best practice" on this database management doubt 😕 .

[dsander]

In my experience most PHP applications support it because they are commonly hosted using shared hosting providers which used to give you only one database per account.