创建历史记录或某些事件的日志

Question

I am not sure what is better perfomance whise so I ask you guys.

The problem is following:

I have a system where each User gets a certain amount of credit for certain events. So I gave my User an attribute named creditscore that gets altered on those events. Everything works well. But now I want the user to actually see what he did when and how much credit he got for this.

What would be better here:

• Saving the whole history in a text attribute and add lines for each event

  or

• writing an extra model associated with the user and create an instance for every event. or

  or

• something way different?

Since there are several events per user per day it would be either a huge text or a huge amount of instances. What would be better looking at website performance.

Answer 1

You absolutely do NOT want to store the history in a text attribute. Management of this will be a nightmare as will querying the data.

You could create a CreditEvent model and store the individual events in there. That would work fine.

However, before you start, check rubygems.org and ruby-toolbox.com to see if someone has already done the hard work. I know of at least one gem that seems to do exactly what you want to do:

https://github.com/merit-gem/merit