This week I've had to revisit merge tables once again due to customers experiencing problems. Although 5.1 merge table implementation is a huge improvement over 5.0, there still remains some critical bugs.

My list is still growing:

bug #45800: crash when replacing into a merge table and there is a duplicate
bug #45781: infinite hang/crash in "opening tables" after handler tries to open merge table
bug #45796: invalid memory reads and writes when altering merge and base tables
bug #45777: check table doesn't show all problems for …

Although I am still busy with writing my thesis paper, I do need a distraction from time to time. Since I started getting phpOpenTracker questions again recently, I decided to (slowly) start working on phpOpenTracker 2.0 again. phpOpenTracker 2.0 will be a complete rewrite, utilizing the features of PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.1.

The biggest problem with phpOpenTracker 1.x is that its database schema is normalized. Even simple …