Question

I am working on a Project in which i have Voting Options Up and Down similar to StackOverFlow. I am not much experienced in DB Designing and thus i got up with the following issue,

First of all, here is my table structure for voting :

1. voteId—–AUTO_INCREMENT with PRIMARY KEY.
2. mediaId—-The Media for which user gives an up/down vote.
3. userId—–The User who Voted.
4. voteMode—1 for Up Vote and 0 for Down Vote. This is an Integer Field.

In this case if i have 100 users and 100 medias, then i will have 100×100 records all total in this table.

The Problem arises here is the DB is getting up with a lot of records and the vote button is dead slow to react now. This is making my client unhappy and me in trouble.

Can anyone suggest me a better model to avoid this Huge Table?

I am using jQuery.ajax to post my vote to server. Also, the project is based on PHP and Zend Framework 1.11. So when i click on UP Icon, it will take some time to respond. Mozilla used to Crash certain times. I tested with inserting via a loop with lots of junk records (around 15000).

Answer 1

You can try these up gradation of your table schema:

//All id's are now unsigned , As you do not need any sign 
ALTER TABLE `voting` 
CHANGE `voteid` `voteid` INT(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, 
CHANGE `mediaId` `mediaId` INT(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, 
CHANGE `userId` `userId` INT(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, 
//ENUM datatype as you need only 2 type of value
CHANGE `voteMode` `voteMode` ENUM('1' , '2') NOT NULL ; 

//Adding index , it will surely increase some speed
//Do **not use** index in **columns you do not need**
ALTER TABLE  `voting` ADD INDEX (  `mediaId` ,  `userId` ) ;

Go through Mysql Index to know more about indexing.

If you are using MyISAM Storage Engine , then i will suggest you to go for InnoDB Storage Engine. It may help you to decide about which engine you should use.

And some other hacks that may help you are:

1. MySQL Query Cache
2. Prepared Statements in php
3. COLUMNS Partitioning

Some resources about MySql Database optimizations :

1. MySQL Tuning
2. Mysql Optimization
3. Real World Scalability MySQL.