Question

I am using SQL Server 2005.

I have a site that people can vote on awesome motorcycles. Each time a user votes, there is one for the first bike and one vote against the second bike. Two votes are stored in the database. The vote table looks like this:

VoteID VoteDate     BikeID Vote
1      2012-01-12   123    1
2      2012-01-12   125    0
3      2012-01-12   126    0
4      2012-01-12   129    1

I want to tally the votes for each bike quite frequently, say each hour. My idea is to store the tally as a percentage of contest won versus lost on the bike table as an attribute of the bike. So, if a bike won 10 contests and lost 20 contest, they would have a score (tally) of 33. I would tally up daily, weekly, and monthly scores.

BikeID  BikeName  DailyTally WeeklyTally MonthlyTally
1       Big Dog   5          10          50
2       Big Cat   3          15          40
3       Small Dog 9          8           0
4       Fish Face 19         21          0

Right now, there are about 500 votes per day being cast. We anticipate 2500 – 5000 per day in the next month or so.

What is the best way to tally the data and what is the best way to store it? Should the tallies be on their own table? Should a trigger be used to run a new tally each time a bike is voted on? Should a stored procedure be run hourly to get all tallies?

Any ideas would be very helpful!

Answer 1

Store your VoteDate as a datetime value instead of just date.

For your tallies, you can just make that a view and calculate it on the fly. This should be very simple to do using GROUP BY and DATEPART functions. If you need exact code for how to do this, please open a new question.

For that low volume of rows it doesn’t make any sense to store aggregations in a table when you can just calculate them whenever you want to see them and get accurate and immediate results that are up-to-date.