Denormalisation built in to the ORM

Some common denormalisations:

* A field maintains the count of a set of related fields, e.g. a forum Thread storing the number of Replies belonging to that thread. * A field is calculated from another field using an expensive operation. For example, rendering HTML using markdown. * A field from a joined table is frequently used for lookups, so is copied to the parent table to avoid having to make a join.

Please add more!

In addition to the count of a set of related fields, also max/min/avg. For example one would want to store the creation date of the newest comment of an article because articles are often sorted by activity.

Contrary to Simon's request, let's please keep design discussion on the mailing list, as per normal. That way everybody can participate and there's a record. Tickets are terrible for design discussions. Yes, it might have to wait for a lull in other active conversations. Thankfully, we don't have to solve every problem in the next week or even the next month.