[wp-hackers] Meta tables: Take 5

[Ozh]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Mike
Schinkel<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> Ideally I'd like to see us give up on the (false?) hope of database
> portability and return to ENUMs. Failing that, a portable alternate would be
> to move from VARCHAR(20) to SMALLINT(2) with a table that defines the keys.
> That would make a big difference in scalability as the number of rows
> increase and additional metadata is added.

To me the main & valid argument against ENUM is that, as stated in the
original ticket [1], it gives much more flexibility to plugins which
can create arbitrary values without modifying core table structure.
Like, I could make a plugin that would deal with new post status like
"ozh" without having to ALTER everything beforehand.

[1] <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4778>

-- 
http://planetOzh.com ~ Blog and WordPress Stuff
http://FrenchFragFactory.net ~ Daily Quake News