[development] Referential integrity -- finally?

[FGM]

One thing I noticed when working with Firebird is for mass imports, it is
almost always much faster to lock the DB, deactivate keys and indexes,
perform the mass operations, and reactivate all once you're over: rebuilding
the constraints once beats maintaining them on a large set of operations.

I suspect the picture could look the same with MySQL. But of course, it
would have to be benchmarked.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Morbus Iff" <morbus at disobey.com>
To: <development at drupal.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 1:00 AM
Subject: Re: [development] Referential integrity -- finally?
[...]
> I'm personally not a fan of it, primarily because it caused me headaches
> in the past. I had to deal with a rather large import to CiviCRM, which
> is all InnoDB and foreign keys and, for speed reasons (2 million
> records), could not use their API. This forced me to add the records to
> the tables manually. And, since the import data was always changing, I
> had to code the importer in such a way that it could start over - delete
> all the import data and prepare the database for a fresh import. Foreign
> keys added tons and tons of time to this - both for the import (though,
> I have no true facts to back this up) and for the actual deletion, since
> the rows had to be deleted in quite a specific way, otherwise the
> foreign keys would complain about splintered data.
[...]