Discogs View Cleanup

This week I learned about PostgreSQL’s conditional expressions in general and the COALESCE expression in particular. A big part of the grungingess of my Discogs Postgres views is dealing with the data’s usage of alternative name variations or anvs in the fabric_track_artists view which are quite often NULL. This propagates into a crappy ad hoc value for the track_artists via abuse of concat_ws. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that can be handled more elegantly with a COALESCE.

A couple of other things that need investigating:

1. The regexps for fabric vs fabriclive should be collapsed into one
2. Rename the fabric_live column to a more general fabric_series and compute it from the title column
3. Reexamine the UNION statements to see if they can be handled by a more appropriate join

Lots of redundancy that can be cleaned up.