Question

How would you go about selecting records timestamped within a certain amount of time of each other?

Application and sought solution:

I have a table with records of clicks, I am wanting to go through and find the clicks from the same IP that occurred within a certain time period.

e.g.: SELECT ALL ip_address WHERE 5 or more of the same ip_address, occurred/are grouped within/timestamped, within 10 minutes of each other

Answer 1

Decided not to try for a single query on the raw data.

After discussion with a friend, and then reading about options mentioning the memory engine, and PHP memcatche; I decided to go with a regular table to record click counts that use a time to live timestamp. After that timestamp is passed, a new ttl is assigned and the count is re-set.
One thing is for my application I can’t be exactly sure how long the parameter configuration settings will be – if they are larger and the memory gets cleared, then things start over.

It isn’t a perfect solution if it is run on user link click, but it should be pretty good about catching click fraud storms, and do the job.

Some managing PHP/MySQL code (“Drupalized queries”):

$timeLimit = $clickQualityConfigs['edit-submitted-within-x-num-of-same-ip-clicks']." ".$clickQualityConfigs['edit-submitted-time-period-same-ip-ban']; // => 1 days // e.g.
$filterEndTime = strtotime("+".$timeLimit);

$timeLimitUpdate_results = db_query('UPDATE {ip_address_count} 
SET ttl_time_stamp = :filterendtime, click_count = :clickcountfirst WHERE ttl_time_stamp < :timenow', array(':filterendtime' => $filterEndTime, ':clickcountfirst' => '0', ':timenow' => time()));

$clickCountUpdate_results = db_query('INSERT INTO {ip_address_count} (ip_address,ttl_time_stamp,click_count) 
VALUES (:ipaddress,:timestamp,:clickcountfirst) 
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE click_count = click_count + 1', array(':ipaddress' => $ip_address,':timestamp' => $filterEndTime,':clickcountfirst' => '1'));

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DB info:

CREATE TABLE `ip_address_count` (
   `ip_address` varchar(24) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
   `ttl_time_stamp` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
    `click_count` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`ip_address`)
)