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.
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@nasby.net EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
