Yes, the extender system allows for mini pagers and such which can have better performance and fewer features. Here is a great article describing some techniques: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/09/24/four-ways-to-optimize-paginat.... As for your specific example of the front page query, an alternate approach for such a site is to swap in a materialized view - http://drupal.org/project/materialized_view (no code in CVS yet) On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Robert Douglass <rob@robshouse.net> wrote:
- The new database system (DBTNG) now supports pager and tablesort queries via "extenders," which means that we can now work on converting pretty much all of Drupal core queries to DBTNG. Feel free to pick off an issue from http://drupal.org/project/issues/3060/term/131 if you'd like to get a head start on learning this essential part of Drupal.
Can these extenders be used to make pagers that *DON'T* do a pager query, but just go to the next chunk until there isn't any? The reason I ask is that the current pager system barfs with millions of nodes. Queries like "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM node WHERE status = 1 AND promoted = 1" take enormous amounts of time to execute with millions of nodes, but are a part of every q=node front page. There are other examples.