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

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Shawn Wilsher <sdwilsh@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 2/6/2011 12:42 PM, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
>
>> My current thinking is that we should have some relatively large
>> limit....maybe on the order of 64k?  It seems like it'd be very difficult
>> to
>> hit such a limit with any sort of legitimate use case, and the chances of
>> some subtle data-dependent error would be much less.  But a 1GB key is
>> just
>> not going to work well in any implementation (if it doesn't simply oom the
>> process!).  So despite what I said earlier, I guess I think we should have
>> some limit...but keep it an order of magnitude or two larger than what we
>> expect any legitimate usage to hit just to keep the system as flexible as
>> possible.
>>
>> Does that sound reasonable to people?
>>
> Are we thinking about making this a MUST requirement, or a SHOULD?  I'm
> hesitant to spec an exact size as a MUST given how technology has a way of
> changing in unexpected ways that makes old constraints obsolete.  But then,
> I may just be overly concerned about this too.
>

If we put a limit, it'd be a MUST for sure.  Otherwise people would develop
against one of the implementations that don't place a limit and then their
app would break on the others.

The reason that I suggested 64K is that it seems outrageously big for the
data types that we're looking at.  But it's too small to do much with base64
encoding binary blobs into it or anything else like that that I could see
becoming rather large.  So it seems like a limit that'd avoid major abuses
(where someone is probably approaching the problem wrong) but would not come
close to limiting any practical use I can imagine.

With our architecture in Chrome, we will probably need to have some limit.
 We haven't decided what that is yet, but since I remember others saying
similar things when we talked about this at TPAC, it seems like it might be
best to standardize it--even though it does feel a bit dirty.

J