My web app offers personalized recommendations. When a user starting to use it, about 1000+ rows are being inserted to one big recommendation table, correlating with other tables in the database. Every item the user votes for affects all of those 1000+ rows.
Since the recommendation info is only useful during the session, and since the recommendation table is getting huge, we’d like to switch to a more appropiate method. There’s the possibility of deleting the relevant rows as soon as the user session is over. I guess PHP session array or temp tables are better for this case?
First: consider redesigning your data structure, I think it is not optimal.
Store a user’s recommendation in a table user-recommendeditem-score: I don’t see any need for a temp table or anything else.
Otherwise, you could start using sessions, but you should encapsulate the code carefully, making it easy to change if/when this solution is no more maintainable.