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by ch4s3 915 days ago
This would be a total waste of effort when you need to be building a product and iterating. I hate articles like this because they do a poor job contextualizing the tradeoffs and when it might be appropriate to do the weird exceptional thing.

IMHO if you have a performance critical case when foreign keys are in the way, load THAT data into an in memory DB on a recurring basis and server time sensitive requests from there.
1 comments
GoblinSlayer 915 days ago
Foreign keys are slow on delete, not on read. If you have a popular table, say, users, and all other tables refer to it, then deleting a user locks the database for time proportional to the number of foreign keys - good old linear scaling.
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bhaak 915 days ago
It doesn't lock the database, it only locks the rows of the tables that have foreign keys to the popular tables and are referencing the user you are deleting.

Rightly so because when deleting the user the database needs to do work to keep the referential integrity. Either it nulls the user_id, delete the rows, or it throws an error.

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ch4s3 914 days ago
Sorry I should have specified read/write and side that you can read from something in memory that is consistent after some short delay.
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