[development] Pathauto scaleability - path column in node / user table

[Khalid B]

On 5/8/06, Karthik <narakasura at gmail.com> wrote:
> May I ask why this cannot be accomplished using a JOIN (and adding
> appropriate field(s) to the url_alias table) rather than adding a new
> field to the node table?

Not all aliases in the url_alias table are nodes, and hence we cannot
have a "nid" column.

If we do a join, it will have to be on a string (e.g. "node/123") which will
be very expensive as joins go ... The same type of performance drag
that the concat of realm in node access ...etc.