MySQL Need suggestion with database structure on storing large data

Question

I need to store statistics of my website.

I need these

1: I can query how many hits in day, week month, last month, etc based on a category.
2: Then I can sort stats according to countries, day, pages etc.

I know these way to do it

Table all_stats

| category |  page_url  | country |    date     |.......
|    x     | index.php  |    US   |  timestamp  |.......
|    y     | index2.php |    UK   |  timestamp  |.......
.
.

Then I can query as

SELECT * FROM all_stats WHERE category=x AND date<=today AND date>=last week

This works fine but problem with this is 
as database increase query takes a lot of time to execute.

To solve query speed store daily country based stats from above table in other table with 256 countries and island etc like

Table daily_stats

| category |  page_url  |   US    |    UK   |.......|  date |
|    x     | index.php  |   1000  |  1500   |.......|   1st |
|    y     | index2.php |   1500  |  2000   |.......|   2nd |
.
.

Then I can query like

SELECT 
SUM(US) AS us
SUM(Uk) AS uk
.
.  //all 256 countries and island etc
.
.
WHERE category=x AND date<=today AND date>=last week

But this will be a big table with many columns

Another approch I see is

Creating table smart_stats

| category |  page_url  |     country_array    .......|  date   |
|    x     | index.php  |   US=>1000, UK=1500  .......|  1st    |
|    y     | index2.php |   US=>1500, UK=2000  .......|  2nd    |
.
.

This can be smart approach if I can add all country stats in some way

Please suggest a way to make possible query from table smart_stats country_array that I can sort in any way I like

Or suggest what you think will be the best approach to this

Thanks

Answer 1

Your all_stats structure is probably fine. This query:

SELECT *
FROM all_stats
WHERE category = x AND date <= today AND date >= last week

can benefit from an index. I would actually recommend two: (category, date) and (date) . The first should speed up the query considerably. The second handles queries that are not looking for a specific category.

If you generally want all countries at the same time, you might find that pivoting the countries helps. It actually reduces the absolute size of the table as well as the number of rows -- if all or most countries are represented each day. The problem arise in querying a table with hundreds of columns, as well as maintaining the table for new countries (and MySQL has a limit on the number of columns in a table, so what works for countries might not work at the province/state/city level).

Answer 2

You can add the following index:

ALTER TABLE `all_stats` 
ADD INDEX `categoryDate` (`category` ASC, `date` ASC)  COMMENT '';