Storing “votes” in a database

Question

I\'m writing what will be an intranet application, and one of its features is roughly analogous to content voting - not unlike what SO, Amazon, and many other sites do.

Answer 1

If you need to track whether a user has voted for a particular item, and if there are different values of vote (so 1 star to 5 stars, for example), then this is about as compact as it gets.

Don't forget that for sensible access speeds, you'll need to index the data (two indexes, probably - one with ContentID as the leading column, one with userID as the leading column).

You'll need to decide whether there is a reason not to store the table separately from other tables. What this means depends on the DBMS you use - with Informix, the table would be in the same database but stored in a different dbspace, and you might have the indexes stored in two other different dbspaces.