如何构建我的数据库以存储我的网站的用户行为（关注，收藏...）[关闭]

Question

I'm building a website that contains articles, these articles won't be shown until the user is logged in, I'm planning to add two buttons, the first one is called "follow this article", the second is meant to make the article as a favourite. My question is how can I structure that in my database?

Should I just add a table that contains id_article, id_user, followed(1 or 0) and favourite (1 or 0), or is there another solution that would let me economize more memory space?

NOTE: My website will have lots of articles that will be visited by a lot of users.

Answer 1

Make two separate relations: articles_followed (id, id_article, id_user) and articles_favourite (id, id_article, id_user). This will give you enough flexibility in:

• adding new attributes, specific for each relation,
• sharding your database (at some point): it'd be easier to move one relation from another since they are not depending on each other,
• concurrent update: you can use separate locks on these two, in addition, you'll have fewer issues with transaction visibility,
• you don't need to keep is_followed or is_favourite flag: if there's an entry, then it means that article is followed (once unfollowed, simply remove the line)

Think about your domain classes structure -- which option would be more convenient to code? I bet, in case of two separate relations, it would be clearer.