Purpose of urlmd5 column in tracks persistent

> Probably a dumb question, but could somebody explain, preferably without
> too much jargon, why the urlmd5 column exists and how it is used?

It's there for performance reasons. Joining tables by text fields (no
fixed length) turned out to be super slow compared to the rather short
32 char hash.

See the following discussion for details:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...o-optimize-SQL

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Michael