I have been using phpbb, and noticed some of the way phpbb handle posts, which is different from drupal handle node.
I appologize if anybody feel offended by my comparing them. I know Drupal is a great project, that's why I am here. And I am pretty new to Drupal, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
All post in phpBB has fields like id, poster (author), last updated, visit counts, etc. as well as subject (title) and post text. phpBB store the regular int or char fields in one table, and the subject and post contents (both are text) in another table. I am wondering if this is because this makes the post table smaller (not much text, most fields are int or char or varchar), and thus faster for regular query for display the list/index etc. It also has topic table which has subject but no content text.
As node is the fundamental type here, it has title, teaser and content, which probably every new type that inherits from it will have to carry, because Drupal is for content management. This is the best choice for content management. But it will become less efficient if it is used for management of items like contacts, directory, etc, which does not have much text content, but many different tiny or small fields.
As it is currently with Drupal, I don't see case where we are creating a node directly, mostly we are creating a story, a static page, or a book page, or other type of node. Thus, it sounds to me it might be faster to query the node table if we move the teaser and body content from node to it's child type, such as story, page, etc. I am not sure how much this will affect the query of node table. Anybody knows database please correct me if I am wrong. But the fact is that node table is the one been queried the most. A smaller node table should make all the queries on node table easier and faster.
