All of the products on this Magento CE site I'm working on are imported through a modified Dataflow importer. Almost all of the changes to products are made with the Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Action
model. (There is a call to the normal product save model when categories are changed though.) The issue that I'm seeing is a ton of NULL
values in the database tables. For instance, if there is a Dropdown attribute called Type and only 10% of products actually have a value for the attribute, the other 90% will be given a NULL
value in the database.
Right now the site has around 60,000 SKUs. As an example, the catalog_product_entity_int
table has just shy of 1,000,000 rows. 700,00 of those rows contain NULL
for the value
field.
Does Magento benefit in any way from having a row for every product/attribute combination for all products that have been saved since an attribute was added? I'm sure that NULL
values in the catalog_product_entity_int
table take up very little hard drive space, but I could see it slowing down joins a lot, (especially left joins.)
Should I be trying to clean these NULL
values out?