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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T22:46:03+00:00

I want to store last 5 days stats for a user in database. I

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I want to store last 5 days stats for a user in database. I have two types of db table design in my mind.

Design 1:

id      user_name   stats
1        Peter       54             //Day 1 stats for Peter
2         Peter       50             //Day 2 stats for Peter
3         Abc         10             //Day 1 stats for Abc
4         Peter       55             //Day 3 stats for Peter
5         Abc         14             //Day 2 stats for Abc.

Design 2:

id  user_name   day1    day2    day3    day4   day5
1    Peter       54      50      55       -      -
2     Abc        10      14       -       -      -

Which of the above two is better ?
Since I want stats for only last 5 days, thats why I want to overwrite the oldest day stats when adding new day so that at any time there are maximum 5 days stats for the user.
Please tell me how that should be done.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Design 1 is far superior. If you decide you want to record more days in future, you don’t want to have to write another set of queries to get to this data. I presume you meant to have a ‘day’ column in Design 1? Why not have a DateTime field to indicate the day like so:

    id    user_name      day           stats
1     Peter          31-Mar-2011   54
2     Peter          01-Apr-2011   24
3     Abc            01-Apr-2011   23

    Then you can purge the data at your own convenience. The id primary key field is simply to simplify row identification when used in queries / updates.

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