would it be better to abstract longtext to other table

[sfullman]

This is a quick question.

I expect a table to have thousands of entries. The table only has foreign keys and dates in it, no CHAR or VARCHAR fields.

However, I need a field called Settings to store a lot of encoded data, but i DON'T need to normally refer to this data in a query or join or etc., i.e. it's only used in post-process.

So, would it be recommended, using mysql 4.x or 5.x, to put the LONGTEXT field in another table and join the rows one-to-one by an ID? I'm thinking the main table may query faster with no blob-like fields in them. Again, this table could have 10,000+ records in it at one point.

Samuel

[Roger_Ramjet]

If your columns are all properly indexed then it makes no difference at all as JOINS etc will just be using the indexes. However, disk I/O will be affected if you are not going to retrieve the other column most of the time. That is, the disk heads will not have to move so far across a thinner table to retrieve multiple rows. If you do need that column in your results most time then it will slow disk I/O down as the heads will have to move from table to table as well as processing an extra index to find the related rows.