Question

I want to track keywords and have a score system in my database for each user.

I’ll have a user table and their website table.

user table will have basics of user id, email, password, etc
website table will have id, user_id, keywords, and score.

So I will keep all their keywords (max 5 keywords) in a website table implementing the MySQLicious tagging solution.

The question I have is, I will be constantly updating the score so should I also keep the “score” field in website table or create a brand new table and link all the scores based on website’s id field??

edit: also should I keep the keywords in the same table or separate them?

Answer 1

If all you have is a score, it is best to add it to the website table. In most cases, making a separate table complicates things while offering little advantage. However, there are some cases in which you may want to make a separate table:

• You have many many websites and only some of them have a score. Instead of storing NULL scores for most websites, you add a separate table that only stores scores for websites that have them.
• The website and scores do not have a one-on-one relation, or that relation has properties on its own (not likely in your scenario).
• You have a lot of websites already and are now adding the score functionality. You maybe don’t want to change the database schema because that takes a long time when deploying the new version of your app. Instead of changing the website table, which may take a long time, you add a new table.