[development] One-to-one tables considered harmful

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com>:

> On 6/5/07, Mark Fredrickson <mark.m.fredrickson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Flame war aside, I think there are some good points in this thread.
>> Perhaps someone can clarify two points:
>>
>> 1. Is it kosher to add columns to other modules' tables? E.g. Is it ok
>> for comment to add it's statistics to the node table. Similarly, I
>> could imagine the stats module would want to add summary information,
>> and perhaps other modules as well.
>
>
> If one module is core and one is contrib, then it is not kosher (IMO).
> Actually
> it is not the sanctioned way of doing things, but no one stops a module
> author from doing this or a site from having their own "schema fork". There
> are consequences when upgrading, and they should be prepared to live
> with their decisions.
>

But it may be a reason to begin to collaborate with each other and 
agree to combine module functionality if both modules are contrib 
modules.

> If both modules are from core, then why not? We avoid the performance
> issues caused by having two tables, and are actually more normalized
> that way.

I agree.

Earnie