[wp-hackers] Consolidating database tables and other assorted items

[Steve Lewis]

On 4/9/07, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
>
> I fully agree with all the points your making with regards to query
> complexity..
> But I firmly believe that the slight overhead introduced by database
> abstraction is more than made up for by the more streamlined queries.
> Obviously streamlined queries w/o database abstraction is even better, but
> 1
> statement with 2 joins is by far much more efficient than 4 queries....
>

Hey, I'll back you upon that one. I have toyed with generating an relational
mapping accessory to help optimize join behaviors but haven't resolved a
couple of the challenges yet.  As has been noted, retrofitting something
like that into WP to improve performance without sacrificing the existing
encapsulations would be more than a little challenging. :D

As for DB abstraction or no, maintainability and performance optimization
tend to be conflicting goals.  Abstractions help us as developers, they
don't improve performance.  I will happily trade some performance for
maintainability, and aside from wanting to see joins performed more
frequently by WP's API I think WP strikes a good balance.  Better caching is
the single most important thing that WP can do to be more digg-proof out of
the box, and I understand why there is resistance to adding WP-Cache to the
core.

-- 
SteveL