Re: Deletes hurt

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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