Future Direction

The database tables have changes some as the product has grown from supporting only FoxPro to supporting standard client-server databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. Lyris ListManager has some new tables and table changes. These type of changes are likely to continue.

It is likely that ListManager will continue to migrate the database design towards a more client-server architecture. The number of tables should increase, and the "width" of some tables will be reduced. More lookup and referential tables will be used to increase the speed and reliability of the design. In future versions, all text blobs that store one-to-many results should be replaced with table lookups.

In ListManager 7.8 the outgoing portion of the database mail queue was redesigned. To support clustering, the config_ table, which contained server configuration information, was divided into four tables: lyrConfigClusterSettings, lyrConfigIPAddrs, lyrConfigNodeSettings, and lyrRelayHosts.

It should be expected that many other tables will be altered in coming versions of ListManager.

The basic functionality of ListManager should not change, but the way in which some of the data is stored will change. If you write custom SQL statements to the current ListManager design you need to be prepared to change these as new versions of the software are released. Hopefully these changes will be simple, such as making a single-table lookup into a multi-table lookup using a join, but it could be more complicated.

For more information on ListManager tables, see About ListManager tables.