On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 8:39 AM, Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
Why do you want to scrap this, and embark on a several-month-long development effort to reimplement it with more complexity? There certainly isn't any significant technical benefit in it, besides the fact that it seems a little cleaner from the outside.
If, for instance, all category links were stored only in categorylinks, we wouldn't have the problem of denormalization. categorylinks isn't fully reliably right now because it duplicates information from the page text, and might fall out of sync. Storing things in a single blob instead of broken into tables -- or duplicating data in multiple places -- is a violation of the relational model and tends to hurt correctness, performance, or both.