I want to store all accesses to a webpage with user-agent, script-execution-time, request-uri, full referer and some more variables.
What I have been doing is use normalized MyISAM tables like:
stats
stats_user_agents
stats_referers
stats_requested_uris
But in a normal webpage this takes some SELECT’s and 1 INSERT.
It’s better use ARCHIVE tables?
The stats records will be from 0 to some millions.
There’s some basic comparisons here between isam, compressed isam, archive and innodb engines.
Short answer is ISAM is fastest for storing, retrieving and slicing the data.