[wp-hackers] Meta tables: Take 5

[Joseph Scott]

On Aug 4, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Peter Westwood wrote:

> Please don't use ENUM as it is a mysqlism
>
> We switched away from it [1] to make our DB schema more portable and  
> to make it easier for people to write alternative database classes.


Just wanted to second this.  Please don't use ENUM for this.  I think  
Otto (or Ozh) already pointed out that using ENUMs would reduce the  
flexibility of the meta table dramatically by requiring ALTER TABLE  
just to add a new meta type.

ALTER TABLE in MySQL on large tables will slow the DB server to a  
crawl because it will rebuild the entire table.  Seems there was talk  
of optimizing this case:

	http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,4775,4775

I think the flexibility factor is enough to avoid using ENUM.

--
Joseph Scott
joseph at josephscott.org
http://josephscott.org/