At 4:34 PM +0000 12/12/08, Colin Guthrie wrote:
'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
Col:
I'll continue rambling.
Excellent point -- Yes, I forgot about security issues. For example
most on-line credit card processing agreements state that you must
delete the actual credit card information (i.e., cc and cvs numbers)
within 24 hours of a customer's purchase.
I often have problems explaining that to clients who want to keep
such information on-line. I tell them what they do with the hard copy
of that information is their business, but I'm not going to jail to
keep that data in a database for them.
Anyone else experienced that problem? And if so, how did you handle it?
Cheers,
tedd
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