[sr-dev] rfc: unique id for profiles

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

Hello,

from the last IRC devel meetings discussions, one topic was about adding 
an unique id field per user profiles, with the decision to bring it to 
mailing lists for broader audience.

That will help to reference easier across records. At this moment, the 
most relationships are via (username) or (username,domain) when 
use_domain=1, bringing some complexity.

The main reasons I came up to this were:
- in the perspective of gruu implementation for usrloc, with global 
addresses, an unique (opaque) id seem to simplify things, no matter SIP 
address of the user changes or not -- the public gruu id can be 
different than the internal one, though
- it will open a new group of K and S modules for merging, S using 
unique ids mostly everywhere

Moving towards it will be done gradually, keeping backward compatibility 
for a while. The first steps will be to add new column in few tables 
(subscriber, location), the username/domain columns will stay there 
forever in most of the cases, they will become additional info over the 
time (e.g., primary sip address in subscriber).

 From the point of view of filling up the column, can be as simple as 
setting it to username at domain, or generate some unique string with tools 
out there.

Overall, there will be a bit more db space used at the benefit of 
reduced complexity in the code. Jason Penton mentioned that IMS 
architecture relies also on unique ids.

Looking forward to comments, alternatives, etc ... sr-users community 
was cc-ed because it is not strictly technical discussion/decision.

Cheers,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel-Constantin Mierla
Kamailio Advanced Training, April 23-26, 2012, Berlin, Germany
http://www.asipto.com/index.php/kamailio-advanced-training/