It’s decision processes like this that quickly turn PMs, DBAs and APs into bitter people who will begin to plan for every eventuality, regardless of what the company actually wants.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course.

When it comes to blog entries, you’re right that they don’t take up very much space. If I were to have just my entries and comments in a MySQL database, the total “cost” would be less than 400 kB. With the size and cost of storage, this number is barely a concern.

But can the same be said about other online databases? Twitter (whose popularity still confuses me) seems to have the same quality of content as we’d find on an internet chat room. Do we really want to indefinately store something as trivial as [ "Went grocery shopping today. The parking lot was packed" - April 18, 2008 ] ?

Perhaps I should have used that web application as an example rather than a blog
Archaeologists might be interested to know what our lives were like in excrutiating detail, but it will be another century before “the dawn of the internet and its effects on the human race” is an area of study at schools.

What I like about this subject is that there is no right answer, and it opens the door to a conversation of what we’d like to store, and for how long.

Most of the time the need to retain this data isn’t to get at the record so much as for legal purposes. Between contractual agreements with customers, legal requirements for various alphabet letter legislation and so on … some of our data needs to be retained for up to a decade.

Other times it’s just plain lack of foresight. I used to own a label printing application. Now this is a high-powered beast that gets data from the ERP system and sends jobs to hundreds of printers world-wide. Yet .. they’re just _labels_ with extracted data from elsewhere.

We were going to get rid of the data as soon as it was printed. Then the users dropped in a requirement for label re-print without referring to ERP.

At that point the PM sort of threw up his hands and decided we’d revisit the get rid of the data problem later. It’s been five years now and there are records in that db that date from the very beginning of that system.

But .. blog entries. As long as google has no problem with me it’s not a biggie. When I run it on my own server I’ll worry about it. Or maybe not - how many mb does a blog post take up in mysql?

Sounds logical
I agree that, for the moment, most bloggers will not worry about the size of their databases, the number of entries they have, or the relevance of their content (Lord knows I don’t), but as the segment continues to mature and people start building multi-decade blogs, it may get to a point where someone would want to start trimming their less popular archives
Perhaps I’ll make a note to check on this idea some time in the 2030’s….

Many of my visitors that have come through a search engine do so on old posts, the last thing I’d want them to find is a 404 because I’d been cleaning up old posts.

Plus each old post is a single page as far as the almighty Google is concerned and thus counts as a small increment towards increasing my page rank and the value of doing a link exchange with me.