Earl Miles wrote:
No, you misinterpreted mine. Drupal is modular. comment.module is a module. Now, it's a poor module -- it has some rather nasty integration with the rest of the site which, IMO, it should not. But it worries me that one of the solutions is to re-integrate rather than to make it properly modular.
The schema for Drupal core is not modular and never has been (at least looking back to 4.7).
So to me, instead of merging comment data into the node table, it sounds like the node_comment_statistics table needs to reflect other data that is being filtered in some way. IMO, this would be preferable. Doing it any other way might end up creating a requirement to have comment.module on (or make a site very, very useless if comment.module is off).
There is no debate here, no matter what theoretical model you prefer. The database requires that all criteria for WHERE and ORDER BY exist in the same table to achieve acceptable performance. That table is {node}. The only way to realize the same performance goals without combining the fields in {node} is to create another table that contains the same fields, but just isn't called node. That would be pointless.