File uploads sizes in moodle 2.6 assignments

One of our teachers emailed me this am saying "all my assignments are set back to 1MB upload size, was it the upgrade?".  This is one of our more astute teachers, and he was correct.

I upgraded the moodle instance to 2.6 recently and did not notice that change.  I am surprised, since some of the courses, like the one(s) taught by the teacher who notified me, had different upload size settings.  I know this, because I helped the teacher set those limits in his courses.

My first upgrade to moodle 2.6 surprise was a global overriding of file upload size limits in assignments.

Eventually, I found this setting.  Notice the path in the top of image.  The default setting of 1 MB trickled down to all the existing assignments. That trickle down was annoying.  When I changed this to 20 MB and it trickled down again into the existing assignments, that was sweet.

Changes made here can be overridden at the course level and again at the assignment level.  The limit you set here, in the site wide setting, is the max value that is avail. at the course and activity level.  In other words, if you set the limit to 50 MB at the site level, you can restrict that further at the course and activity level, but you cannot go higher.

The other change I noticed was a new table structure for the assignments data.  I initially browsed the mdl_assignments table, expecting to see all the records, but the table was empty!  What?  I double checked to make sure I was browsing the correct DB in MySQL Workbench.  Then I noticed the new set of tables prefixed with assign.

What I noticed upon further review was in Moodle 2.2 - there were only 2 tables related to assignments.  In moodle 2.3 there were 11 tables prefixed as mdl_assign.

Clearly this means a bit more assignment functionality and re-engineering of the tables to host that data.  This is just the first time I noticed.

Moral of the story?  Moodle assignments are full of capacity or usability.  With that fullness, comes complexity and sometimes ambiguity, at least for me as I try to figure out how the behavior has changed and where the data is located.