Um, then what are indexes good for? Or query caches, for that matter? And it's not about the size of those inserts, but about the overhead of performing inserts in the first place -- lots and lots of them -- only for those records to be retrieved once or twice and then deleted as each user gets rid of older notifications. Then there are all the things that can go wrong with this system -- all the extra moving parts. That's no theory; things are regularly going wrong over there. So I can't help but wonder.
Um, then what are indexes good for? Or query caches, for that matter? And it's not about the size of those inserts, but about the overhead of performing inserts in the first place -- lots and lots of them -- only for those records to be retrieved once or twice and then deleted as each user gets rid of older notifications. Then there are all the things that can go wrong with this system -- all the extra moving parts. That's no theory; things are regularly going wrong over there. So I can't help but wonder.