DB design document

[David Merrill]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 09:18:39AM -0600, Rob Browning wrote:
> Dave Peticolas <dave@krondo.com> writes:
> 
> > Anyway we can avoid putting arbitrary limits on the lengths of text
> > fields like account names & such? Currently gnucash imposes no such
> > limits and I think it would be good to keep it that way. I know
> > postgres has arbitrary length text fields, but I don't know about
> > others.
> 
> I agree with Dave completely.  (This is on my list of things I'm
> accumulating that I want to suggest when I finish catching up on this
> thread.)  Although I suspect that whether or not we can support this
> easily depends on whether or not we're willing to (a) limit ourselves
> to a particular DB, (b) have "per installation settings" that allow
> you to select arbitrary lengths if you're willing to pay the price (or
> perhaps limit yourself to a particular set of DB's), or (c) plan to
> depend on a server-side proxy that can handle the messy details of
> storing arbitrary length strings (if that's even possible) in DBs that
> don't handle them natively.

I'm going through the schemas this morning and enlarging all of those
fields. If I miss something, let me know.

Unfortunately, however, allowing *very* large text fields has serious
drawbacks in databases that it does not have in XML. You pay a price
in terms of storage space and indexing, which translates to query
execution speed. Not just on the record with large entries, but on all
of them.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                dmerrill@lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org
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