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Databases

Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points
Posted by Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points

Real Web Applications: Database for each user?

Many websites keep information about each individual user.

Eg: Treehouse has a record of all videos each user has watched.

Question: Having a table for each user doesn't seem ideal, so how is this information stored?

Is information like this stored in one big table where each row has a user id has a list of videos watched, or is there some other way?

1 Answer

Sue Dough
Sue Dough
35,800 Points
Sue Dough
Sue Dough
35,800 Points

You should have a users table and each user is a row. You can then use the user id from that table for other tables as a reference.

Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points
Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points

But when keeping large amounts of data about each user (Eg: Youtube has a history of every video watched by each user), Is there a better way than creating millions of tables (One for each user) containing a list of videos watched by the user?

How is this history of an individual user stored and accessed? Would all histories be stored in one table? (If so how could this be done) Or would each history be its own table?

Brendan Whiting
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Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,735 Points
Brendan Whiting
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,735 Points

There would be one User table, and each user is a row in the table (so millions of rows, not millions of tables). If it's a relational database, you could have a User table and a Video table and also something like a Video_Watched table that stores pairs of user_ids and video_ids and maybe a timestamp and how much of it they watched.

If it's a NoSQL database, you could just store an array of videos ids nested in a videos_watched column in the User table.

Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points
Oisin M
Oisin M
5,463 Points

Ok thank you very much :)