Is a separate integer namespace property actually necessary? I got the impresion that namespaces were designated by a prefix in the article title, such as Special:, User:, or Wiki:
In that case, one could find all the articles in the Wiki: namespace by doing this query:
SELECT article_id FROM cur WHERE title LIKE "Wiki:%" ;
And if we had some indexes defined, that search would actually be extremely quick to do.
Any reasons why we need to keep a separate column for "namespace"? If we want to keep namespaces in their own column, maybe we should have a table of namespace id's and their corresponding prefix, and then NOT put that prefix as part of the articles actual title.
Jonathan
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org