Re: [Bug 11351] New: [IndexedDB] Should we have a maximum key size (or something like that)?

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Pablo Castro
<Pablo.Castro@microsoft.com>wrote:

>
> From: public-webapps-request@w3.org [mailto:public-webapps-request@w3.org]
> On Behalf Of Jonas Sicking
> Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 1:42 PM
>
> >> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Jeremy Orlow <jorlow@chromium.org>
> wrote:
> >> > Any more thoughts on this?
> >>
> >> I don't feel strongly one way or another. Implementation wise I don't
> >> really understand why implementations couldn't use keys of unlimited
> >> size. I wouldn't imagine implementations would want to use fixed-size
> >> allocations for every key anyway, right (which would be a strong
> >> reason to keep maximum size down).
>
> I don't have a very strong opinion either. I don't quite agree with the
> guideline of "having something working slowly is better than not working at
> all"...as having something not work at all sometimes may help developers hit
> a wall and think differently about their approach for a given problem. That
> said, if folks think this is an instance where we're better off not having a
> limit I'm fine with it.
>

My only concern is that the developer might not hit this wall, but then some
user (doing things the developer didn't fully anticipate) could hit that
wall.  I can definitely see both sides of the argument though.  And
elsewhere we've headed more in the direction of forcing the developer to
think about performance, but this case seems a bit more non-deterministic
than any of those.


> >> Pablo, do you know why the back ends you were looking at had such
> >> relatively low limits?
>
> Mostly an implementation thing. Keys (and all other non-blob columns)
> typically need to fit in a page.  Predictable perf is also nice (no linked
> lists, high density/locality, etc.), but not as fundamental as page size.
>
> -pablo
>
>