Question

Let’s say that I have an article on a website, and I want to track the number of views to the article. In the Articles table, there’s the PK ID – int, Name – nvarchar(50), and ViewCount – int. Every time the the page is viewed, I increment the ViewCount field. I’m worried about collisions when updating the field. I can run it in a sproc with a transaction like:

CREATE PROCEDURE IncrementView
(
    @ArticleID int
)
as

BEGIN TRANSACTION

UPDATE Article set ViewCount = ViewCount + 1 where ID = @ArticleID

IF @@ERROR <> 0
BEGIN
    -- Rollback the transaction
    ROLLBACK

    -- Raise an error and return
    RAISERROR ('Error Incrementing', 16, 1)
    RETURN
END

COMMIT

My fear is that I’m going to end up with PageViews not being counted in this model. The other possible solution is a log type of model where I actually log views to the articles and use a combination of a function and view to grab data about number of views to an article.

Answer 1

Probably a better model is to cache the number of views hourly in the app somewhere, and then update them in a batch-style process.

— Edit:

To to elaborate more, a simple model for you may be:

1. Each page load, for the given page, increment a static hashmap. Also on each load, check if enough time has elapsed since ‘Last Update’, and if so, perform an update.

2. Be tricky, and put the base value in the asp.net cache (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478965.aspx) and, when it times out, [implement the cache removal handler as described in the link] do the update. Set the timeout for an hour.

In both models, you’ll have the static map of pages to counts; you’ll update this each view, and you’ll also use this – and the cached db amount – to get the current ‘live’ count.