Home/ Questions/Q 206411
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T17:38:37+00:00

I’m developping a chat application. I want to keep everything logged into a table

  • 0

I’m developping a chat application. I want to keep everything logged into a table (i.e. “who said what and when”).
I hope that in a near future I’ll have thousands of rows.
I was wondering : what is the best way to optimize the table, knowing that I’ll do often rows insertion and sometimes group reading (i.e. showing an entire conversation from a user (look when he/she logged in/started to chat then look when he/she quit then show the entire conversation)).

This table should be able to handle (I hope though !) many many rows. (15000 / day => 4,5 M each month => 54 M of rows at the end of the year).

The conversations older than 15 days could be historized (but I don’t know how I should do to do it right).

Any idea ?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    54 million rows is not that many, especially over a year.

    If you are going to be rotating out lots of data periodically, I would recommend using MyISAM and MERGE tables. Since you won’t be deleting or editing records, you won’t have any locking issues as long as concurrency is set to 1. Inserts will then always be added to the end of the table, so SELECTs and INSERTs can happen simultaneously. So you don’t have to use InnoDB based tables (which can use MERGE tables).

    You could have 1 table per month, named something like data200905, data200904, etc. Your merge table would them include all the underlying tables you need to search on. Inserts are done on the merge table, so you don’t have to worry about changing names. When it’s time to rotate out data and create a new table, just redeclare the MERGE table.

    You could even create multiple MERGE tables, based on quarter, years, etc. One table can be used in multiple MERGE tables.

    I’ve done this setup on databases that added 30 million records per month.

    • 0