I'm trying to merge and existing list of 900-odd email-list subscribers into an existing membership system.
The existing system uses the userid (eg "Justin") as the primary key. Obviously, I don't have the leisure of asking 900-odd people what their preferred userid is, so I've decided that I need to change the way that users login from userid|pass to email|pass.
This way I can just send out a random password to each existing subscriber.
I have some concerns about members needing to type such a long email address in to login, but putting that aside, my main concern is that the email address should be something that can be changed, so it can't be the primary key.
I've come up with the following data design, which I'd appreciate comments on:
userid (INT 5, primary key) email (varchar 255, unique) password (varchar 32, md5hash) firstname (varchar 50) lastname (varchar 50)
So, when a user logs in, I check for a match on email and password, then assign the userid to the session, probably also assigning their first & last names as another session variable, for a human-readable name on message boards etc etc.
When the user changes his/her email address, it won't affect their primary keys, scattered across many tables... it will just affect how they log in.
Any comments?
Justin French
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