Jeff Warnica wrote:
On the other hand: It disturbs me that the prefs are in a BLOB (rather then say, a prefs table).
Historical reasons.
This itself may be reason not to make this a preference, as the following would likely take a very long time:
select user.user_email from user where user.user_options like "% featuredbymail=1%";
I don't know how, or if, MySQL could optimize that. I believe it would have to do a comparison on every record in the user table.
Yes, it would have to check every record. The usual thing to do would be to change the schema of the user table, adding an indexed field for this particular preference.
Is there some regular daily processing that inspects every user record already?
No.
-- Tim Starling