Re: Deletes hurt

["Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>]

Jim Nasby wrote:
> 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.

Right. Where we just mark the row as dead and have to vacuum. We just 
delay the pain ;).

Joshua D. Drake


> --
> Jim Nasby                                            jim(at)nasby(dot)net
> EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)
>
>
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