A wild idea just occured to me, which could be used to get the best of both worlds.
We keep a full items table as it is, to save all those unused but accurate fields till we devise and have the time to spare to use them. Basically we change nothing to the original items table, items can still be changed/added in there. It is a 30 MB table, nothing to be worried about.
In addition we create an SQL View for the items table. This view would be used by the EQEmu server (or by tools not worried about the unused fields). In the view we only include the fields that are useful to the Emu. That way the Emu only reads what is necessary. In MySQL I am pretty sure the performance for reading from the view is close to what it would be to read from the original table with the unused fields removed. What is expensive when querying is process-to-process transfer (or machine-to-machinetransfer) from MySQL to the Emu, then re-distributing the item information in the C++ data structures, on the pure MySQL side the gain for having less fields will not be very significant.
Views are very powerful in SQL. You can also update, insert and delete through a view. For insertions the server will fill-in any field not in the view with the default value for the field. Then it is up to every individual to choose between working with the "simpler" view, or with the full items table. If you want to give it a try, create the following view in your Emu DB and toy with it (be careful, inserts, updates and deletes are actually done in the original table !) :
Code:
create view items2 as select id,name,weight from items;
There is just one limitation : I do not know how to specify default values for the view fields (for inserts) different from the ones in "items". It is not a blocking point as the default values in "items" could be changed with no impact on the existing data or on data inserted by specifying all the fields at once. It is just a matter of everyone aggreeing on the "best" defaults. You could even have your own patch you apply to your DB to change those defaults for your own installation. You apply it everytime you reload the table from the PEQ dump, and you are set.
Would that solution be good for you ?
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