[development] Why do we avoid auto-incrementing db columns?

[Mark Fredrickson]

> More over, sp's are made for 2 things:
>
> 1. Reduce network traffic.
> 2. Place the processing on the database server and not the app.

These are two reasons for stored procedures. Wikipedia lists two more:

3. Simplification of Data Management
4. Security

Of all of these, I really only care about 3. I think the wikipedia
article does a good job on that, so I'll just link to it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_procedure#Simplification_of_data_management

> I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think sp's would give Drupal much of
> a performance boost. However, this is a null point because I have no
> benchmarks to back this up.

Agreed. But I actually don't really care that much about performance.
:-) That said, I think we could remove 50% of nodeapi overhead if we
had triggers and views doing most of the load/insert/delete stuff.
node_load is a pretty expensive operation right now. I'd like to see
that improved. I think this is one of Barry's goals with Schema.

> All in all, there are tradeoffs either way...its just which one are we
> willing to accept?

True. We could probably go around in circles on this all day. :-) I
would encourage people to attempt db level logic where possible and
we'll see what happens.

Happy hunting,
-Mark