Question

I have been looking for some optimization tips since I´m doing a RPG modification which uses MySQL to store data by PHP.

I´m using one unique table to store all user information in columns by his unique ID, and I have to store (many?) data for each user. Weapons and other information.

I´m using explode and implode as a method to store the weapons, for example, in one column with the ‘text’ value. I don´t know if that´s a good practice and I don´t know if I will have performance problems if I get thousands of players doing tons of UPDATES , SELECT , etc, requests.

I read that a Junction table may be better to store the weapons and all those information, but I don´t know if that will get better information that you request it by the explode method.

I mean, I should store all the weapons in a different table, each weapon with his information (each weapon have some information, like different columns, I use multiple explode for that inside the main explode) and the user owner of that weapon to identify the weapon than just have them in one column.

It can be 100 items at least to store, I don´t know if it´s good to make 100 records per user on a different table and call all of them all the time better than just call the column and use explode.

Also I want to improve my skills and knowledge to make the best performance MySQL database I can.

I hope somebody can tell me something.

Thanks, and sorry for my stupid english grammar.

Answer 1

It is almost always best practice to normalize your table data. There are some exceptions to this rule (especially in very high volume databases), but you probably do not need to worry about those exceptions until you get to the point of first understanding how to properly normalize and index your tables.

Typically, try to arrange your tables in a way that mimics real-world objects and their relations to each other.

So, in your case you have users – that is one table. Each user might have multiple weapons. So, you now have a weapons table. Since multiple different users might have the same weapon and each user might have multiple weapons, you have a many-to-many relationship between them, so you should have a table “users_weapons” or similar that does nothing but relate user id’s to weapon id’s.

Now say the users can all have armor. So now you add an armor table and a users_armor table (as this is likely many-to-many as well).

Just think through the different aspects of your game and try to understand the relationships between them. Make sure you can model these relationships in database tables before you even bother writing any code to actually implement the functionality.