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You saved 5 cents, and your code is not readable, congrats!
I found myself reading this post, and at some point, I really wanted to cry:
We had relatively long, descriptive names in MySQL such as timeAdded or valueCached. For a small number of rows, this extra storage only amounts to a few bytes per row, but when you have 10 million rows, each with maybe 100 bytes of field names, then you quickly eat up disk space unnecessarily. 100 * 10,000,000 = ~900MB just for field names!
We cut down the names to 2-3 characters. This is a little more confusing in the code but the disk storage savings are worth it. And if you use sensible names then it isn’t that bad e.g. timeAdded -> tA. A reduction to about 15 bytes per row at 10,000,000 rows means ~140MB for field names – a massive saving.
Let me do the math for a second, okay?
A two terabyte hard drive now costs 120 USD. By my math, that makes:
- 1 TB = 60 USD
- 1 GB = 0.058 USD
In other words, that massive saving that they are talking about? 5 cents!
Let me do another math problem, oaky?
Developer costs about 75,000 USD per year.
- (52 weeks – 2 vacation weeks) x 40 work hours = 2,000 work hours per year.
- 75,000 / 2,000 = 37.5 $ / hr
- 37.5 / 60 minutes = 6 cents per minutes.
In other words, assuming that this change cost a single minute of developer time, the entire saving is mute.
And it is going to take a lot more than one minute.
