What are the advantages and disadvantages?
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54answers:
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A:
That depends on what your site is, and how you use that information. On StackOverflow, you are awarded a "yearling" badge once a full year elapses from the time you registered. Clearly here that information is necessary.
If I were you, I'd save it. It's a small piece of information that may become useful eventually. It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. It would be rather difficult to extrapolate an accurate registration date retrospectively if you don't store it to begin with.
Jonathan Sampson
2010-01-10 04:10:54
Agreed, very insightful on the having it and not needing it (hardware is cheap)
Dylan Vester
2010-01-10 04:13:18
Dylan: Hardware may be 'cheap' to buy, but managing it and using it appropriately isn't. That said though, I agree that it is better to have more information than less, in general.
Noon Silk
2010-01-10 04:14:34
A:
Advantage: You don't get in a migration horror when needing it at some point. For a lot of data you cannot find out this data afterwards. You could fake around with MODIFICATION_DATE but often this is not accurate and sits in the future (e.g. when profile can be edited by user).
Disadvantage: In case you never need this information, you wasted space (though another small data payload column shouldn't make a problem). Further more you have an 'all-time' deprecated field, which can be confusing to new developers ("what is this column for, cannot see where it is used...?")
As mentioned the registration-date is most likely a valuable information I would add it from start on. When thinking of persistent data and its model you sometimes have to think "more" for the future.
manuel aldana
2010-01-10 04:29:19