Question

I’m developing an articles site. Should I store articles views on the same table

e-g: should i create a views field in site_ARTICLES table or i should create a new table for that (site_articles_views)..

which one is most optimized?

which one way will create low load on sql database?

Answer 1

You can store article views in your site_articles table if you need nothing more than a simple count(*) of them. You could then just increment a new article_views column when a particular article is viewed:

UPDATE site_ARTICLES SET article_views = article_views + 1 
WHERE ...

If however, you want to do more, such as:

• Display a list of unique viewers
• Count individual viewers
• Present or analyse statistics on the views
• Provide a viewing history for a user
• etc…

Then you should use a separate table – perhaps with the following as potential columns:

id
user_id
date_stamp
article_id

It depends entirely on what you want to achieve. Just a new article_views column would be “most optimized”, but only if that is the limit of the functionality required.