[Mediawiki-l] categorylinks + page denormalization?

[Jim Hu]

Just wondering...

Would it be worth denormalizing categorylinks a bit so that  
CategoryPage.php doesn't have to join categorylinks and page?  I'm  
thinking that having page_title and page_namespace duplicated there  
would help performance.  In particular, I'm wondering if getting rid  
of the join would speed things up enough to make some of the things  
we're doing with our modified category page extensions tolerable on  
other sites (i.e. get real counts for how many subcategories, find the  
subcategories even when they don't sort within the limit etc.) and  
faster on ours.

I know that it violates all kinds of sacred db design principles and  
is therefore probably a bad idea.  Is this a job for (materialized)  
views?
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054