Re: Deletes hurt

["Chris Hoover" <revoohc(at)gmail(dot)com>]

Just curious, what sort of field do they use to mark the rows?  I'm assuming a timestamp since it would half to be part of the primary key, or am I way off?  This has really gotten me thinking about how I might implement this in my database.

Thanks,

Chris

On 5/31/07, Jim Nasby <decibel(at)decibel(dot)org> 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.
--
Jim Nasby                                            jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com       512.569.9461 (cell)



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