This post is a follow-up of this answered question: Best method for storing a list of user IDs.
I took cletus and Mehrdad Afshari's epic advice of using a normalized database approach. Are the following tables properly set up for proper optimization? I'm kind of new to MySQL efficiency, so I want to make sure this is effective.
Also, when it comes to finding the average rating for a game and the total number of votes should I use the following two queries, respectively?
SELECT avg(vote) FROM votes WHERE uid = $uid AND gid = $gid;
SELECT count(uid) FROM votes WHERE uid = $uid AND gid = $gid;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `games` (
`id` int(8) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`title` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` (
`id` int(8) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`username` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `votes` (
`uid` int(8) NOT NULL,
`gid` int(8) NOT NULL,
`vote` int(1) NOT NULL,
KEY `uid` (`uid`,`gid`)
) ;
average votes for a game: SELECT avg(vote) FROM votes WHERE gid = $gid;
number of votes for a game: SELECT count(uid) FROM votes WHERE gid = $gid;
As you will not have any user or game ids smaller then 0
you could make them unsigned integers (int(8) unsigned NOT NULL
).
If you want to enforce that a user can only make a single vote for a game, then create a primary key over uid
and gid
in the votes
table instead of just a normal index.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `votes` (
`uid` int(8) unsigned NOT NULL,
`gid` int(8) unsigned NOT NULL,
`vote` int(1) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`gid`, `uid`)
) ;
The order of the primary key's fields (first gid
, then uid
) is important so the index is sorted by gid
first. That makes the index especially useful for selects with a given gid
. If you want to select all the votes a given user has made then add another index with just uid
.
I would recommend InnoDB for storage engine because especially in high load settings the table locks will kill your performance. For read performance you can implement a caching system using APC, Memcached or others.