Unison Conventions

Be aware of table suffixes

Unison views nearly always have a suffix. We use _v for views which we intend people to use directly and routinely. _cv denotes a cannded view: a special view which defines searches which appear in the canned_views table. _dv indicates a "defining view"; such views are often expensive and are used to periodically generate a materialized view (really, a table) with a _mv suffix.

Specify params_id in queries whenever possible

Most feature tables are indexed on pseq_id and params_id at the very least. Multicolumn indexes typically specify the params_id first, which means that queries which don't provide a params_id will not use an index. This also prevents users from seeing multiple similar results for distinct runs.

Look at the run_history table

If a query returns no results, there are two possibilities: the program returned no output or the sequence was never run with these parameters. The only way to distinguish these cases is by consulting the run_history table or run_history_v view.