Oops, Tabulas had its first significant downtime when my upgrade script much longer than it should of and I went to bed because I couldn't bother waiting for it to finish.

Tabulas has always had the ability to break your entry into two pieces, and it was being stored in the database as two pieces; there were two columns in the primary entry_data table (entry and entry_ext). Now, this is really bad practice.

There's maybe 3% of people who even know how to use the break functions; and with both columns having FULLTEXT indexes, there's a lot of wasted resources. My main priority was cutting down on redundant and stupid setups in the database, and this was the main problem.

So the upgrade script took the data in entry_ext and combined it in the entry table. However, this took a lot longer than I expected (because the entry_data table is about 400 megs) ... and then once I had done this, I had to drop the entry_ext table. The dropping took 2.5 hours.

This is just a lesson to me on how slow mySQL can be when it comes to large data sets. So learn to plan your database architecture right from the start or you'll pay.

But the good news is I've cut down on disk usage on the database by about 20 megs or so (a lot!) ... and I can soon support multiple entry snippets (so you can break more than once).

Unrelated: The lessons of Mogadishu applied to Iraq.