Attempting to validate an empty field causes scan of most/all of authority.record_entry

[Galen Charlton]

Clicking the "Validate" button in the MARC editor when an authority-controlled field is present but empty (i.e., all subfield values are empty) can result in the following query being run in the database:

SELECT "are".id AS "id" FROM authority.record_entry AS "are" WHERE "are".control_set = '1' AND "are".deleted = 'f' AND "are".simple_heading IS NOT NULL;

This is at best inefficient, as it can cause a sequential scan of authority.record_entry and the return of the IDs of most/all of the authority records. It can have worse consequences, since the underlying cstore request is invoked from an atomic method, open-ils.search.authority.simple_heading.from_xml.batch.atomic, meaning that the cstore drone ends up storing the entire result set in memory, which can be sizable if the database contains a lot of authority records.

I have reproduced the problem in the web staff client's MARC editor and suspect it also affects the XUL MARC editor.

Evergreen master

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

A patch is available at the tip of the user/gmcharlt/lp1745462_we_will_not_bow_to_all_the_authorities branch:

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/gmcharlt/lp1745462_we_will_not_bow_to_all_the_authorities

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

^^ Rather, a two-patch series.

[Chris Sharp (chrissharp123)]

Works as expected. Pushed to master, rel_3_0 and rel_3_1. Thanks, Galen!