CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysql
AnchovyLegend
AnchovyLegend

Reputation: 12538

Besy way to store data about data that is already stored in a database?

I am working on creating a favorites section on my website where users can simply store certain items in their favorites section for easy access. Each of the items are already well-defined and have multiple attributes. So my question is lets say I had 10,000 users and I would like to implement a 'favorites' system, what would be the best way to keep track of what favorite items have been added by each user?

I was thinking implementing this the following way: link each favorited item id to a username and then run a query for if the user with a particular username is logged in than retrieve all the favorited items by that username.

I appreciate any help with figuring out of a good way to do this. My goal is to store in a way that is later easy to retrieve and use the data and minimize redundant information.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 73

Answers (2)

Ilion
Ilion

Reputation: 6882

Within an RDBMS you would probably have a many to many table with the user id and article id. You do not need an independent id column:

create table favourites (user_id int, article_id int);

These of course reference your user table and articles table. (Or whatever you have in place of articles.)

You would then need to retrieve all rows for a single user when wanting to show that user's favourites. You might also want to make a combined UNIQUE index on the columns to prevent duplicates.

You may have faster response with something like cassandra where you can simply retrieve based on the key of the user_id and get all their favourites in one easy spot. But then you're dealing with mutilple systems.

I've heard, but haven't had a chance to look into, that MySQL can now support a Key-Value system similar to Cassandra and that may be your best bet.

Upvotes: 1

Christian
Christian

Reputation: 19750

It's pretty easy, you need to create a new table with 3 fields:

id
favoriteID
userID

Every time a user adds a new favourite, it adds a new record to this table, storing both the ID of the favorite, and the ID of the user. There is no redundant information and it's easy to retrieve the details of either the favorite or the user by implementing a join query. This is what relational databases are for.

Upvotes: 2

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