Pierre, if the data was that important, I would add it to another table and maybe even normalize it. This is stuff like the name and company of the commenter - both about as important as the email address that is already there. This is just not serious stuff in this case. Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. ________________________________ From: Pierre Rineau <pierre.rineau@makina-corpus.com> To: development@drupal.org Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 12:33:35 PM Subject: Re: [development] (no subject) Le lundi 12 juillet 2010 à 09:19 -0700, nan wich a écrit :
Is there an official stance on using hook_schema_alter to add columns to core tables? For example, we collect additional data on anonymous comments and want to actually save that data. Rather than creating another table (and subsequent JOINs), I'd just as soon stuff that data into the comments table, where it belongs. Should we ever disable comments (unlikely), we probably wouldn't mind losing that data too. Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
I would say, create a new table instead of populating core one. Each time you'll update your statistics, it will update the core database row, which should have not been updated. It will break most of the DBMS query cache, you will drastically lower your site performances if you have a lot of data. Ever worst, some DBMS do important physical row moves on each update (like PostgreSQL), this is no good, if you don't have to update a row, don't update it. You will may also experience some weird behaviors, like other modules dropping rows and recreating them identically, then loosing your statistics if they do not use drupal_write_record(). Pierre.