Split Feed and Article models

[twm]

Focusing on Article, though the same issues are present in Feed:

Right now the Article model (and corresponding SQL table) contains several categories of fields:

Server-set fields

Field	Size¹	Notes
guid	small	immutable after creation
author	small	there should really be a raw_author
url	small²	there is currently no limit on URL size
date	tiny	fixed-size
raw_title	small²
raw_content	large²
title	small²
content	large²
content_snippet	small	up to 500 characters
content_rev	tiny

¹ This column represents the typical size. Variable-size fields set by the feed generally accept arbitrary values and are marked ².

² This field is variable size. The size is controlled by the source site.

Client-set fields

Two boolean fields may be set by the user:

Field	Size
read	tiny
fave	tiny

Problems

1. Mixed writers

   Some field values are taken directly from the feed. Some are post-processed versions of values from the feed. Some are set by the user. In the Feed model (which has all the same issues) this has caused bugs like Bulk marking articles read can produce negative unread count #323. It would be better to model the server-side stuff in a more formal way i.e. fetch feed → postprocess → available for read.

2. Write amplification of client operations.

   Tables are stored in the SQLite record format in b-tree pages. When a page changes, its revised content is written to a WAL frame. Because the read and fave fields are part of the same page as large fields like content, bulk mutation of articles is likely to cause many page rewrites.

3. Possible read amplification.

   SQLite stores the columns of a row together in a page. Large fields which are not needed for a query are still read from disk. The "raw" fields are located before the sanitized content on disk, and may be large enough to force SQLite to chase to a continuation page.