I am after some advice, I have many custom fields/columns in the feeds table. Is there a limit to how many columns I can safely add or is it advisable to create and additional table if over x amount of columns.
For fields/columns that are just for import / display - there is almost no (practical) limit. Consider, that 20 custom columns is no more strain on the storage engine than one TEXT / BLOB field that could be 10 times the size altogether.
So if you are adding custom fields so that you can register them (Feed Registration Step 2) and import, for display within search results / on your product pages / price comparison tables there is no need to worry (other than disk space - but that's unlikely to be a factor these days).
However, if you were wanting to offer indexed searches by custom fields, for example by adding code to search.php to support a custom fieldname:value search operator, then it would be worth adding an index to the relevant fields. If this is the case, let me know and I'll describe the steps required for creating additional indexes to improve search performance for those queries.
Hi Chris,
For fields/columns that are just for import / display - there is almost no (practical) limit. Consider, that 20 custom columns is no more strain on the storage engine than one TEXT / BLOB field that could be 10 times the size altogether.
So if you are adding custom fields so that you can register them (Feed Registration Step 2) and import, for display within search results / on your product pages / price comparison tables there is no need to worry (other than disk space - but that's unlikely to be a factor these days).
However, if you were wanting to offer indexed searches by custom fields, for example by adding code to search.php to support a custom fieldname:value search operator, then it would be worth adding an index to the relevant fields. If this is the case, let me know and I'll describe the steps required for creating additional indexes to improve search performance for those queries.
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com