I know Bruce says 7.7 is the “last” RM7 update but I would like to suggest one more (and have it in RM8 too). This is directly related to RM8 upgrades, primarily to give people more faith in them.
Early in the RM8 beta process there were some “quirks” in importing RM7 databases, many of them I tracked down had to do with orphaned records in the database. For example if you take your RM7 database and drag and drop it into a new empty RM7 database you may notice the counts are lower. That is because over time some records may become orphaned.
This isn’t an issue unique to RM. Needless to say “Clean Phantom Records” doesn’t remove them. You may see them as people with really high RIN numbers that you cannot edit or delete.
When I was asking some questions about this early on it was suggested by Renee that I drag and drop my database into a new one before I imported it into the RM8 beta. That resolved many of my miscount issues and other oddities, and I eventually cleaned up my RM7 database using SQLite Tools so it no longer became necessary. That wasn’t a process I’d expect “normal” users of RM to be able to do so I suggested it be added to “Clean Phantom Records” at that time.
Seeing that other people are having issues matching up their counts and worrying about the integrity of their upgrade I’d like to suggest to the RM team that they resurrect my old suggestion and apply it to RM7 to make the move to RM8 a more confident one.
I can’t honestly say if the issue exists in RM8, but software does crash and that means the database can get orphan records. If and when the day comes for RM 8.5 or 9 or whatever (or to eliminate the need to tell people to rag and drop their database to a clean one) a more robust “Clean Phantom Records” would be helpful.
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Yes, these kind of inconsistencies can lower users’ confidence.
I think that the check for orphaned data could be done in RM8 when importing an RM7 database.
I’m hoping that RM8 makes better use of SQL transactions to avoid orphaned records in the future.
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