Accessing Issues in the EPIC through JIRA database

[Nikesh V]

Hi All,

I am working on analyzing the data on the JIRA, I am connected to the JIRA database via ODBC drivers. I want to get the information on the issue in the epic. Can anyone help me by giving some information on which table I have to check?

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

Nope.

This is not a question of "which table", you should be starting from "how many tables".  The answer should also completely scare you off. 

As a simple example, consider the question "show me an issue". 

• In the UI, you go to a page that has all the issue data on it. 
• In the REST API, you ask for the issue and get a pile of JSON back that has everything in it that the web UI shows you.
• In SQL, you start from the jiraissue table and then have to join it to 18-30 other tables, sometimes several layers deep, and often multiple times.  And that's just to get a simple issue with no custom fields or links to anything else, let alone comments, history and and and.  Even better, there are some things that are not even in the database, despite the web UI and REST being perfectly happy to show them to you in a single simple hit.

Forget working directly with the Jira database, it is simply not built for any sort of reporting or analytics.

When you are doing your "analysis of Jira data", broadly what are you looking to report on?  If we know roughly what you're looking for, we can probably tell you a far better way to get the information you need!

[Nikesh V]

Thank you @Nic Brough _Adaptavist_ for your detailed information which helped me to understand the workflow, as of now the focus is to work on getting the following link built epics -> issues -> task -> sub-task and then we would move to work on analyzing issues(inter-project issues, etc). 

BTW your answer did scare me :D thinking about the workload.

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

Those are all linked in different ways, so also a right royal pain to do in the database.  I really do suggest you stop and do this properly.  (Oh, and the heirarchy is Epic -> Issue/Task -> Sub-task, not the four layers you've described - was that a typo?)

[Nikesh V]

Yes, it was a Typo, I didn't notice it, you were right wrt to the hierarchy, so do you think it is better to consider REST API for the task mentioned above instead of using the database?

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

Yes, it is very much easier to use the REST API to work with Jira data.

As a random example "get a really simple issue" - 18 joins in SQL and having to work out what IDs refer to which part of each clause.   Or you can make one REST call and get the whole issue, with descriptors for every piece of data in one go.

[Nikesh V]

Got it, I will start looking into API's, Thanks @Nic Brough _Adaptavist_ for sharing the information.