Object Metadata Proposal

>   From owner-db-wg at ripe.net Thu Nov  8 17:53:37 2001
>   From: Andrei Robachevsky <andrei at ripe.net>

Dear Andrei,

I think both proposals (this one and the garbage collection) are very
good and very useful.

I just have a further suggestion and a question (I apologize if this has
already been discussed).

>   Metadata Contents
>   ------------------

>   Other meta-attributes may be added as needed.

My suggestion would be to add a meta-attribute "creation-time:" which
would store the date and time the object was created (as opposed to
"update-time:", which only shows when it was last updated).
This attribute would never change.

The rationale behind having this attribute is that one would have a
proof of the existence of the object in the database from (at least)
creation-date (until at least query time).

This may help for example auditing LIR assignments to the same end-user
(which is limited to one AW worth in any 12 months).



My question would be about the generation of the initial values (of
update-time and ref-time) for the _existing_ objects.

One aproach would be to use the "changed:" value for "update-time",
and for "ref-time" the most recent "changed" value of the objects
referencing the given object. The only problem is that we know
"changed" is not (very) reliable.

An other approach would be to use the time of the (initial) creation
of the meta-attributes as initial value both for "update-time" and
"ref-time". This is probably misleading. A better approach would
probably be to leave these values empty, but this would not meet the
current spec.

The most exact approach would be to retrieve the exact values from the
update logs, but this is probably too expensive.

My question is which approach do you plan to take (one of the above or
one I did not think about)?


Thanks and regards,
Janos