Question

I have an MySQL table:

CREATE TABLE responses (
    id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    other_id INT NOT NULL,
    details TEXT,
    deleted BOOLEAN,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

Users could delete records in responses.

My plan is to use the field deleted to implement deletion. Any time a user deletes a record, I’ll set deleted to 1.

Every now and then I might want to get rid of all the deleted records or to archive them. I’m thinking of using partitioning to make that faster:

PARTITION BY LIST(deleted) (
    PARTITION pActive VALUES IN (0),
    PARTITION pDeleted VALUES IN (1)
);

My question is would this make the act of deletion slower? Now that when I change a record’s “deleted” field, MySQL would need to move the record to an entirely different partition. That seems like it could be slow.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Yes, I’d expect the transition between the two states to be slower for sake of being passed between the partitions. But deleted/non-deleted queries on existing values would be faster, though queries that don’t involve the deletion status wouldn’t be improved.

It’s all about what is the most common operation in the table, and accepting that there can be compromises.