Question

I am trying to develop a small app, that will store User’s input about Videos in an mySQL Database. The problem is that I want Users to have an mySQL Table for each video added.

so my approach is kinda this one

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  has_many :Videos

end

Example: The web app will gather User’s 56 Input for Video 23 and execute an mySQL query “INSERT INTO video_23_info VALUES …

Each time I add a new video to the database I want a table to be associated with the User.

I don’t know if my approach is correct. I first thought of just using text files, and storing them on the server, into a separate folder or each User, instead of using MySQL.
Any help?

Answer 1

Having a different table for each user would be wrong and a bad practice.

You could instead create a table videos and keep all videos there:

Your table could distinguish who uploaded each video through a user id column ie:

video_id  | user_id | other info
--------------------------------
    1        100         
    2        200         
    3        100         

So you can then query the table to either select all videos, select a particular users videos alone or anything your imagination can come up with.

Then you can instead of use table_100 for a user’s videos, just use WHERE user_id = 100 in your query and only get that user’s videos