timothyawiseman (1/3/2011)
When I am thinking about the trade offs for creating an index, I will consider carefully how often the table is written to and the trade offs in write performance, but I won't give a second thought to the disk space because it is cheap relative to making my users wait. I will create complicated and large indexed views in the same way.Similarly, I tend to log procedures extensively. This costs disk space, but that disk space is cheap compared to having a problem in production and not being able to track down in detail when, why, how, and who caused it along with enough information to know what the answer should have been.
I completely agree. And that is the point of the article: since the table is the foundation for where that data will keep showing up (indexes, log tables, etc.) then making good choices at the beginning makes it that much easier to create whatever indexes and logging are needed. Those are valid business reasons to use disk space and their impact to performance will be "appropriate" for the benefit of having the feature if the columns making them up were not arbitrarily wasting space to begin with.
So, I agree, it was a good article with a good point and one that developers and DBAs should remember. I just want to caution against taking it to an extreme. Disk space should never be wasted, but at least in the situations I regularly see trading disk space for detailed logging or improved perofrmance is almost always a good trade. Disk space is cheap enough to justify that.
Thanks. And the intention of the article was not that anyone would go to the extreme but instead they would start thinking about things that they previously had not and in doing so make better choices. It is not a matter of sacrificing something that is necessary; it is a matter of not doing things that are unnecessary. I am not saying: do not use the disk. I am saying: try to use disk wisely because it is far too easy to use it foolishly.
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