I am currently working on a big management system (in PHP using Zend Framework, but that is not really revelant of the solution to this question) in which I have to manage multiple entries. Each entry has many fields and span on two tables in a 1-to-many relationship (through a single foreign key). There is roughly 50 fields in the first table and 30 fields in the second one.
I am now at the stage to implement a history tracking of the different modifications made by users (and some automated tasks). Each entry might enventually be rolled back partially or totally to a previous value.
I was thinking about using a system similiar to the one present in the CMS Typo3. One table to manage the whole history with the following fields
- history_id
- entry_id
- entry_table
- last_modifcation_timestamp
- last_modification_user
- data
The data would be “serialized” in a json or xml format.
My concerns through this method is that overtime, the content of the history table would grow exponentially. To overcome this issue, I was thinking that i could make a new database to manage this history every years and then show history data by years to the users.
I am looking for advice about ways to improve this solution and ease the implementation. Any advice or documentation to help me will be welcome
I’d add a threshold and remove or dump to an external file all entries older than a certain period of time.