NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

Disk space and memory truly were expensive...in the 90s. Joomla was
born in 2000 though.

Here's a (hopefully) interesting little story. I once got into a huge,
heated debate with a consultant about data modeling. His argument was
that random incrementing integers were bad design and negated the
benefits of primary keys. His biggest beef was that your table already
had a primary key - even if it was a composite key - and that slapping
an integer on there would only cause you pain in the long run.

This pain sounds a LOT like the data migration issues everyone has
with all these random, incrementing integers as primary keys :-)

For the record, the conversation was at ClassMates.Com waaaaaay back
around 1997. I thought the guy was a total loon. However the more I
think about it, the more I realize he was just ahead of his time. Back
then we still needed those integers for all the bazillion JOIN
operations across tables with more than fifty million rows each... As
everyone starts to denormalize their data models however, this will
become a bigger and bigger headache, as all your logic is tied to
those numbers when all that is really important to YOU is the post's
title, the user's username, component's name, etc.

-- Mitch