`active' flag or not?

Question

OK, so practically every database based application has to deal with \"non-active\" records. Either, soft-deletions or marking something as \"to be ignored\". I\'m curious a

Answer 1

Yes, we would. We currently have the "active='T/F'" column in many of our tables, mainly to show the 'latest' row. When a new row is inserted, the previous T row is marked F to keep it for audit purposes.

Now, we're moving to a 2-table approach, when a new row is inserted, the previous row is moved to an history table. This give us better performance for the majority of cases - looking at the current data.

The cost is slightly more than the old method, previously you had to update and insert, now you have to insert and update (ie instead of inserting a new T row, you modify the existing row with all the new data), so the cost is just that of passing in a whole row of data instead of passing in just the changes. That's hardly going to make any effect.

The performance benefit is that your main table's index is significantly smaller, and you can optimise your tablespaces better (they won't grow quite so much!)