Can a changelog id and issue id clash?

[daniel.picardo]

By clash, I mean whether they can have the same value? That is can there ever be a situation that both changelog id and issue id have the same value within an organization? 

It seems to me that this is possible since they are some form of auto-incremented numbers and I don't see how Jira could 'reserve' a number range for issue ids that will not overflow at some point unless those ranges are allocated in chunks and dynamically. Can someone clarify please?

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel,

This question is kind of difficult to answer, but I'll try to explain why.  With Jira Cloud, there is no access to the SQL database to confirm or deny this.  However if we look at Jira Server, which I expect is still working much like Cloud in this manner, we can take a closer look at how these values relate.

Your term of clash is somewhat confusing here to me.  Yes it's technically possible that an issue.id and a changeitem.id or changegroup.id values could contain the same values. 

But this does not pose a problem that I can see.  This is easier to see in Jira Server because you can query these SQL tables directly to get a better understanding of the database layout.  It might be worth taking a look at the Jira Server Database schema.  But again, please note that Jira Server might not be setup 100% exactly the same as Jira Cloud's database manages this today. 

In the changeitem table, you have fields of id, groupid, and others.  The changeitem.id is a unique identifier to that table and that doesn't refer to the issue.id at all.  Instead the changeitem.groupid value references the changegroup.id value. The changegroup table has fields such as id, issueid, author, and created. 

So while the issue.id and changeitem.id fields might have the same values, since these don't actually refer to each other, there really is not any conflict or clash that I can see here.  At least in Jira Server, there are a few different SQL tables in use to manage/track these changelog items.

Perhaps I am not fully understanding your concern here.  Could you let me know if this helps?  And even if it doesn't I'd be interested to learn more about your concern here.

Regards,

Andy

[daniel.picardo]

Hi Andy,

Sorry for not making this clear earlier but your answer actually answers my question. 

I was looking to use those values outside of Jira into a table so that I can generate custom metrics. And I generate a base transition/changelog using the issue id. So I wanted to check if I could use it as is or need to use a custom calculation (add a base value) so that there is no chance of me hitting a changelog id in an issue with the same value as an issue id. 

So it was not a concern but to understand Jira a bit better. Now that I come to think of it, I probably did not even have to ask this question! :( Sorry for the needless bother. 

By the way, the numbers in my org's changelog and issue ids are off by 600k or more. And that is actually, what prompted the question. 

Thanks for the explanation too!

Thanks,

Dan