i agree here. the storage would be trivial, considering how much other data we store anyway. even if you have 500k users, that would add what? an additional 8 char(0) fields would be something like .5M, but the db would still be so large that that's a small percentage.

David Strauss wrote:

Remember that MySQL cannot truly index bitmasks. Consider a series of CHAR(0) columns, which would take the same space but be indexable.

-----Original Message-----
From: Earnie Boyd <earnie@users.sourceforge.net>

Date: Sat, 03 May 2008 09:59:43 
To:development@drupal.org
Subject: Re: [development] User Status [WAS: User last access]

Quoting Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com>:

A) Make status have a lot of different states with int/consts.
B) Make status a bitmask field (compact but harder to query).
C) Break status out into a series of is_foo fields (possibly a lot of
needless data).


I like option B for this.

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/
-- http://give-me-an-offer.com/