During mid-September, WowStead changed its hosting partner to Curse Inc.. In doing so, it needed to migrate vast amounts of data over to the new Web servers and, among other things, merge the databases of both websites together. This was necessary given that users will log in to WowStead using their Curse Account. Unfortunately, several problems arose from the process:- WowStead users that do not have a Curse Account cannot log in to WowStead.
- WowStead users that do not have a Curse Account have lost access to their characters and subsequently need to reclaim them.
- In the vice versa of the above, users have access to their characters but do not own the account they were assigned.
While explanations of what went wrong are not readily forthcoming, a likely cause is the misuse of the methods adopted to merge the two databases together. Given the popularity of relational databases in storing website data, one can contemplate how the use of relational algebra can bring about such complications.
