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While this is an interesting method (packaged in a broad, bait-ish claim), I'd like to see where the described benefits are actually worth the increased complex

While this is an interesting method (packaged in a broad, bait-ish claim), I'd like to see where the described benefits are actually worth the increased complexity and difficulty: for situations with a few 10-100.000 inserts/day, you will not run into locking issues and beyond that, the wasted disk space will become noticeable to prohibitive, especially on cloud-hosted systems. History and undo might be useful in some situations (not likely with password changes as in the example though), debugging is probably better achieved with rotated logs, not extra data in your database (which you might want to backup regularly...).

chris_wot 13y ago
Except for specialized applications, I just cannot see how this is a good idea. As the table size grows, your indexes are potentially going to get enormous. And as your tables grow larger, there are other issues also. He uses mySQL, which I'm not as familiar with, but I know with a index organized table in Oracle, or a table with a clustered index in SQL Server, there might be a lot fragmentation going on and the table might need to be reorganized. In short: an interesting idea, but impractical in most cases.