From someone with more experience than myself, would it be a better idea to simply count the number of items in a table (such as counting the number of topics in a category) or to keep a variable that holds that value and just increment and call it (an extra field in the category table)?
Is there a significant difference between the two or is it just very slight, and even if it is slight, would one method still be better than the other? It's not for any one particular project, so please answer generally (if that makes sense) rather than based on something like the number of users.
Thank you.