On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
It could even make sense to move the text revisions to/from the file namespace (with an appropiate warning). I once wanted to moving a file talk page to the file namespace, to archive (delete) them together. Or you might want to move an overdescription to NS_MAIN.
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Is this worth the architectural complications in this case? It could be done, but . . .
Or maybe this would be no extra overhead? Do we normally do links updates on page move? We must already be updating categorylinks with new sortkeys if applicable, no? We could update the namespace at that point too. Maybe I'm being too averse to this denormalization -- I got rather disillusioned when the counts in the category table started constantly falling out of whack.
Note that even if you're not storing it, the database is likely to be reserving the space for that.
The entire point of varchar/varbinary is that it uses a variable amount of space. It will use one byte per row or such if it's empty.
It can be useful to discern explicit sortkeys when the rules for language parsing change, though.
Yeah, I thought of that too. If we kept no raw copy in the database, we'd have to reparse all pages to update the collation. Plus we could use it for the initial letter. Any other uses that it has?