Re: Deleting vs foreign keys

WireSpot wrote:
> On 10/25/05, Csaba Nagy <nagy(at)ecircle-ag(dot)com> wrote:
>
>>I guess your master table has a considerable tree of child records for
>>each deleted record, that's why the deletion takes so long. We have this
>>situation too on top level object deletion. Our solution is to make it
>>asynchronous, i.e. the user requests it and then a background job does
>>it. There's no way to make such deletes blazing fast.
>
>
> It's a bit puzzling, frankly, to see a nice example of engineering
> (which is what I consider a consistent DB design) foiled by a
> performance and practical issue. :(

Don't kid yourself that there's a solution to this. If you've got a site
with a lot of data in a lot of dependent tables, then have to expend a
certain amount of effort to delete them.

Anything PG did to make your delete faster would almost certainly slow
down updates/inserts/selects. Managing a lot of data takes a lot of effort.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd