[development] One-to-one tables considered harmful

[Jonathan Lambert]

On Jun 3, 2007, at 5:20 PM, Larry Garfield wrote:

> I'm saying that optimizing for big, dedicated hosts at the expense  
> of the
> $20/month hosts is a losing proposition.

I just have to back Moshe up here.  If you optimize for the large  
scale cases where you need scalability - well, that's just smart, and  
you'll have absolutely minimal impact on the vast majority of users.   
If anything,  optimizing for this case raises all performance across  
the board, including on lower end accounts - where performance and  
the need to lessen impact to shared infrastructure can be especially  
important.

In all honesty, I can't see a valid argument in anything you wrote,  
and I'm looking for it.

If you're saying that we're going to lose performance or the ability  
to run on low end hosts, that's not a valid argument.  Not only would  
innodb be supported *just fine* on cpanel, plesk, isp config, and  
other control panels (we are talking about MySQL 4.x and up, which  
all of these systems now ship with - even Plesk), but if anything  
memory limits would actually *drop* due to optimization for large  
scale setups.  InnoDB will run out of the box on any of these (in  
fact, I've got InnoDB setups running on all three of them right now).

This issue is a non-starter - there is no possible argument here,  
other than a gentle reminder to keep things compatible and friendly  
for new people in the community, and that's an issue I think everyone  
involved in this community bears in mind and takes to heart - we want  
to see new users.

If we were talking about stored procedures, triggers, transactions,  
and other more costly and complex database-layer problems, there  
might be an argument here.  But we generally avoid those to try to  
keep things compatible (there's a reason; hint: you mentioned it). ;-)

I admire you enthusiasm for a good debate though.  ;-)  Let's let  
this one die - it's a somewhat inane line of argument, and will lead  
us nowhere.
--
Jonathan Lambert
Principal | FireBright, Inc.
Email: j at firebright.com

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"Grove giveth and Gates taketh away."
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