On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Happy Melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
It may or may not be an architecturally-better design to have it as a separate table, although considering how rapidly MW's 'architecture' changes I'd say keeping things as simple as possible is probably a virtue. But that is the basis on which we should be deciding it.
It's an intentional denormalization of the database done apparently for performance reasons (although, I still can't figure out exactly *why* it's being done as it still seems to be useful only for the dump system, and therefore should be part of the dump system, not part of mediawiki proper). It doesn't even seem to apply to "normal", i.e. non-Wikimedia, installations.
On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:45 PM, Happy Melon happy.melon.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
This is a big project which still retains enthusiasm because we recognise that it has equally big potential to provide interesting new features far beyond the immediate usecases we can construct now (dump validation and 'something to do with reversions').
Can you explain how it's going to help with dump validation? It seems to me that further denormalizing the database is only going to *increase* these sorts of problems.