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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T19:17:31+00:00

I am working on the web application developed in ASP.Net using C#. Allong with

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I am working on the web application developed in ASP.Net using C#. Allong with other feature, there is a feature which allow users to add various items to their personal list. The database tables relevant to above features are:

-------------------------
| Item                  |
-------------------------
| ItemId (Primary Key)  |
| . . . & other attribs |
-------------------------

---------------------------
|List                     |
---------------------------
|ListId (Primary Key)     |
|. . . and other attribs  |
---------------------------

Since there is many to many relationship among above two table (i.e One Item is added in many lists and one list contains many items) So i create third table for that 

---------------------------------
|ItemList                       |
---------------------------------
|ItemId (Foreign Key)           |
|ListId (Foreign Key)           |
|. . . and other Attributes     |
---------------------------------

Now, I in need to maintain track that how many times a certain item is added in the list. In order to acheive this i have two possible options

  1. I add a new attribute in Item table and increment that value with one every time when a particular item is added to a certain list.
  2. The second option is that whenever i need to know that how many
    times a particular item is added in the list, then i will apply the
    SELECT Count Query (with where clause) on the ItemList table

Please suggest which approach is better and why? I am more declined towards the second approach, and regarding efficency i guess both have same

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Option #1 will perform better for read operations because the count has already been aggregated. The downside to this approach is that you must:

    • Manually update this number yourself for every insert and delete across your application.
    • Update this number every time an item is added to the list. If you’re application write to read ratio is high it might not be worth the effort

    Option #2 will perform better if you’re application has more insert/deletes compared to reads. The reason for this is that SQL Server only needs to calculate the count when it is needed.

    I would suggest going with option #2 unless you have identified performance issues that would make you want to take a different approach.

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