'Twas brillig, and tedd at 12/12/08 15:16 did gyre and gimble:
My first tendency is to keep everything. After all, memory is cheap and
access times are always reducing.
While it's true that having a bunch of worthless data doesn't accomplish
anything and slows the process of dealing with it. But, technology in
access times and storage capabilities are getting to the point of making
the decision to keep/delete worthless data moot.
As such, I think the need for FK deletions will become less and perhaps
disappear from the language. For some reason, I look upon deletions in
similar light as renumbering a table's index after deletion of a record
-- like "what's the point?"
I'm just rambling -- thanks again for your insight.
Rambling is good... I'll continue!
With data retention and data protection laws (something that can vary
around the world making life for web-based providers like ourselves even
more complex), I think it is increasingly important that information
about a given person can be scrubbed very easily. Keeping the data may
be cheap from a storage/access perspective, but complying with laws and
regulations can be wearisome and time consuming.
If you FKs are fully up-to-date and have proper cascading you can be
sure that a simple:
DELETE FROM users WHERE user_id=123;
really will delete all the information you store about that individual.
You just have to look at the hullabaloo over the "deactivated" Facebook
accounts etc. to realise that hiding or disabling data is not enough in
many cases.
Food for thought!
Col
--
Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/
Day Job:
Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
