CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpajaxxmppreal-time
SmootQ
SmootQ

Reputation: 2122

Creating a news feed realtime

I have a database containing many tables : [followers, favorites, posts ...etc)

These tables define the different activities a user can achieve, he can send posts, add other people to favorites and follow others.

What I want to do.. is to extract data from these tables, and build a real-time news feed .

I have two options:

1- Creating a separate table for the notifications (so that I won't have to get data from multiple tables, then using a Javascript timer to return results every x seconds.

2- using XMPP server...that sends (or pushes) notifications every x second, without actually sending any ajax queries.

And for these two options, I don't know whether I should connect to these tables to get news feed, or just create a separate table for notifications.

I searched in the subject, but I didn't find something really helpful yet, Any links will be appreciated.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1289

Answers (2)

srain
srain

Reputation: 9122

The request for news feed will be very frequently. So you must keep your code run fast and take as less resource (CPU-time, database query) as possible.

I suggest you to take the first option. It meets your requirement and is simple enough.

Because you have many tables, all of them will grow bigger day by day. Every time you connect them to get news feed will take a long time and increase the load of your database. In the other hand, you query sql will be complex.

Like @Curtis Mattoon said: avoid having to duplicate data, but sometime, we need spend more space for less time.

So I suggest to create a new table to store the notification data. You even can delete the old data from this table periodically.

At the same time, your sql and php code for news feed will be simple and run fast.

Upvotes: 2

Curtis Mattoon
Curtis Mattoon

Reputation: 4742

If your data is normalized, you should be able to pull all the data with one query (using JOINs), or you could try creating a View if you want to query from one table. It's always best to keep your data in the appropriate tables to avoid having to duplicate data.

The push notifications are easier on the server, since they're not receiving requests from each client. Depending on your load, you could probably get away with simple AJAX requests.

Upvotes: 2

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