Question

I have 200 users each user will eventually have a “reviewINFO” table with certain data.

Each user will have a review every 3 to 4 months

So for every review, it creates a new row inside the “reviewINFO” table.

This is where i’m stuck. I’m not sure if I need to serialize a table inside each row or not.
Example:

-> links

“USER1reviewINFO”-row1->USER1table1

             -row2->USER1table2
             -row3->USER1table3
             -row4->USER1table4
             -row5->USER1table5

“USER2reviewINFO”-row1->USER2table1

             -row2->USER2table2
             -row3->USER2table3
             -row4->USER2table4
             -row5->USER2table5

using this method it will make a couple of thousand rows within two years. And I think its harder to manage.

“Userxtablex” is a table with dynamic rows of children names,ages,boolean

What i’m think of doing is serialize each USERxtable into its corresponding row.

Please help as I would not like to make this complicate or inefficient

Answer 1

Generally, you should never have to serialize data of this nature into a table row to accomplish what your goal is (which I am assuming is an implicit link between a user and a review)

What you need to do is key the reviews by a user_id such that all the reviews are packaged in one table, and relate numerically back to the users table.

Assuming you have an AUTO_INCREMENT primary key in the user table, all you would need is a user_id field in the reviews table that represents what user the review relates to. There is no need for a separate structure for each user, if that’s what you are suggesting. Reviews can have date fields as well, so you can perform queries for a specific year or window of time.

You can then use a JOIN query to select out your data set relating to a particular user or review, and apply the usual WHERE clause to determine what result set you want to fetch.