不知道如何存储一些数据

Question

I'm making a website that lets you share your music tastes, it works with a desktop client that monitors your media player (iTunes, whatever), and sends the details of the song that is currently playing to the site, where it is associated with your profile.

This output is displayed on your profile, and the idea is the page mirrors your local music player, right down the the position of a progress bar.

However I can't decide how to store the data. As soon as the song is over, it becomes useless, so something permanent like a MySQL database seems pointless.

Session variables don't work, because the script that does the work is not directing you to the page that displays the output. The idea is that the backend script just gets the info as it arrives and saves it somewhere, and you can get the latest info whenever you load the profile page.

I'm currently using a textfile, as a bad and temporary solution, just writing a new line each time and then reading it.

What is there between session variables and SQL?

And how can I get the output page to update every time there is new data? I need a way of storing it that allows events to be triggered, so checking it mustn't be too intensive.

Answer 1

I think a (My)SQL database would be alright, especially if you want to show the last few songs somebody played.

But if you just need a temporary data store to hold a single song per user, you could use a key-value store like memcached. It stores data directly in memory instead of a file or database. The key would be something unique (like the user's name or id) and the value would be data about the currently playing song.