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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T17:26:36+00:00

Let’s say I have a rails app with 3 tables, one for questions, one

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Let’s say I have a rails app with 3 tables, one for questions, one for options (possible answers to this question), and one for votes.

Currently, when requesting the statistics on a given question, I have to make a SQL query for each option which will look in the “votes” table (around 1.5 million entries) and count the number of times this option has been selected. It’s slow and takes 4/5 seconds.

I was thinking of adding a column directly in the question table which would store the statistics and update them each time someone makes a vote. Is that good practice ? Because it seems redundant to the information that is already in the votes table, only it would be faster to load.
Or maybe I should create another table which would save these statistics for each question ?
Thanks for your advice !

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Rails offers a feature called counter_cache which will serve your purpose

    Add the counter_cache option to votes model

       class Vote < AR::Base
       belongs_to :question, :counter_cache => true
   end

    and the following migration

    add_column :questions, :votes_count, :integer, :default => 0

    This should increment the votes_count field in questions table for every new record in votes table

    For more info: RailsCast

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