MySQL按国家/地区登录日志，最佳方法

Question

I'm planning to log referral clicks in mysql by the country of the IP. Let's say my table is named referral_clicks and has the columns id , referral_id , country . I have 2 approaches in mind now:

1. Create another column clicks which is set to +1 for every country / referral_id. This means that I would have to check first if the row for the specific referral_id and country already exists and if not, create it.

2. Insert a new row for every request. My concern here is, that the table might geht messy and too big, as might get very much referral requests.

What would be the best approach now for something like that, or is there evern a better approach?

Answer 1

Use INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE .

I suggest you create a table with the following columns.

id                (autoincrement)
referral_id
country
clickdate
clicks

I suggest you create a unique index of (referral_id,country,clickdate) .

Then, I suggest you use the following SQL each time you want to log a click:

INSERT INTO referral_clicks (referral_id, country, clickdate, clicks) 
                     VALUES ('whatever', 'whatcountry', CURDATE(), 1) 
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE clicks=click+1

This will start a new row for each referral id, for each country, for each date. If the row already exists it will increment clicks for you.