I'm having a bit of a tiff with the postgres guys an bitweaver, so I
thought I would check my facts here first :)

All the content in bitweaver is stored in a single table, with blobs
storing the actual content, and the rest of the fields containing
management info. The user_id(INTEGER) replaces the 128 character name
field from other designs, but we are still left with three 'guid'
fields, two 16 character for type and format ( wiki-html, blog-text etc.
) and a new 32 character field for language.

My gut reaction is that Firebird would be faster if these three fields
were just INTEGER ( in fact a single byte would do since the three
tables are only a couple of dozen types though language could get bigger
) This would reduce the record by 52 characters, but having to compare
strings rather than a single integer is surely a slower process. I
presume that the tables for the cross reference would life in memory, so
JOIN to provide the text in the query result would be easy.

The other point of discussion is the addition of fields for security and
other management functions. These are currently being added as joined
tables, on the basis that not all records need to have a group_id or
source_id, but when looking at 100k items of content, all of which have
these to fields filled in, I can't see how managing a separate
content_id/group_id pair in a separate table gives you anything, and
even if only 10k of the group_id fields were populated, surely just
having NULL entries for the field in the main table is not going to be
an overhead?

Obviously indexing on something like group_id where there may only be 10
or 20 values for all 100k records, would be a problem, but is there
any way to get round that?

Finally - will FB2 give any help in terms of performance when dealing
with these sorts of question. In particular would there be any
alternative way of handling this key structural element? ( Probably more
appropriate on the Architecture list or developers? )

--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services
Treasurer - Firebird Foundation Inc.