[ome-devel] The coming demise of ROI keywords and namespaces

[Mark Carroll]

These days we are working hard on Regions of Interest. Back in
http://lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk/pipermail/ome-devel/2015-September/003456.html
we asked if anybody actually uses the keywords or namespaces fields on
ROIs. We got no responses, which fits our suspicion that nobody does.

The current plan is for the database upgrade script from OMERO 5.2 to
5.3 to drop the keywords and namespaces columns from the roi table.
First, it will verify that there really is no data in those columns:
specifically, that their array values do not contain any non-empty strings.

PostgreSQL administrators may wish to use psql to check,

SELECT DISTINCT keywords FROM roi;
SELECT DISTINCT namespaces FROM roi;

to check that they really don't have any usage of those fields at their
facility. A value that psql prints as {} is fine, that's just an empty
array.

Any data in those columns that is no longer needed can easily be removed
with something like,

UPDATE roi SET keywords = NULL, namespaces = NULL WHERE keywords IS NOT
NULL OR namespaces IS NOT NULL;

but if you do have important data for ROI keywords or namespaces and
will need the 5.3 database upgrade to somehow preserve it for you then
please let us know promptly.

-- Mark

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