Deletes hurt

[Jim Nasby <decibel(at)decibel(dot)org>]

I'm currently doing EnterpriseDB training at a well-known  
entertainment company. I found out something yesterday that I thought  
the community would find interesting...

In their game (MMORPG) databases, they have fields on all their  
tables that indicate whether a record has been deleted or not. I've  
seen this done before, typically for data retention reasons. But they  
had a daily process that went through each night and physically  
deleted the records that had been marked as deleted.

The reason they weren't actually deleting rows real-time is because  
it cost to much in Oracle to do so. My guess is it's because Oracle  
has to copy the entire deleted row to the undo log as part of the  
delete, which would be pretty costly.
--
Jim Nasby                                            jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)