What is the penalty of a NULLed column in PG? In Oracle it's one byte per field unless it is the last field in a table, then it is zero bytes.
My goal - the TIP's goal - is to have crucial data easily and cheaply available. The packages I (and Tilmann) have mentioned are not available or in a really rugged state. It is so not only because nobody has yet volunteered to take care of them, it is also that OpenACS' data model is not finished.
Quoting myself from this very thread:
Name - exactly as in cr_items. Does it make sense to duplicate this? Probably not, especially as cr_items already has locale, content_type, publish_status etc.
I haven't talked about performance here btw. This is about functionality, that is imho currently direly missing from OpenACS. (I only ruled out PL/SQL as a means of achieving my goals)
Maybe we can move forward because I think there generally is a consensus. We have a few options on how to implement this:
* add a whole slew to acs_objects
* create a table acs_objects_description (sic! that is how I named this table in the Sharenet project :)) that holds name, locale, verbose description and what not. (Package_id still goes into acs_objects)
* Use cr_items instead of acs_objects_description. Advantages here: reasonably well-understood TCL api already exists, the table already exists and is quite fat anyway.
Did I forget something?
Oh yes, what about doing this in a different thread?
