[wp-hackers] Metadata Mess

[Peter Westwood]

On 22 Dec 2009, at 11:41, Malaiac wrote:

> 2009/12/22 Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name>:
>> id,
>> object_type
>> object_id
>> key_name
>> key_value
>>
>> Could easily replace the 3 tables that currently exist. Of course,  
>> it might
>> seem slow that object_type would be varchar and usually a number  
>> index will
>> be faster, but at this point, I'll rather go with anything.

The current solution is scalable enough to support meta against any  
object type and the low level function do just that to allow a plugin  
to add a different sort of meta.

Migrating all the current meta into one table would cause an upgrade  
headache for sites which make a lot of use of the current postmeta and  
commentmeta tables migrating all that data would take time.

It would also break all plugins that did interesting things with meta  
using direct queries because they stored interesting data there.

>
> if we're going in that direction, _PLEASE_ make object_type an ENUM
> and not a VARCHAR. People who are going to use new objects types are
> fluent enough to ALTER the ENUM.


We don't use ENUM because it reduces DB portability as it is not a  
standard SQL datatype.

We specifically switched away from it to make it easier for people to  
write drop in replacements for wpdb which use other databases.

Cheers
-- 
Peter Westwood
http://blog.ftwr.co.uk | http://westi.wordpress.com
C53C F8FC 8796 8508 88D6 C950 54F4 5DCD A834 01C5