data historisation

Hello folks!

        English is not my native language, so please forgive my bad writing.

My question follows:

        I have to build a database that is supposed to monitor web activity on a specific site (a website to send electronic postcards). But it's not only a matter of logging people.

        I need to store things like several informations on each card send, for example, user information along with all the backgrounds, images, music (etc...) that were chosen by the user before he could send his card.

        The problem is how to organize data so it can be fast enough to handle many (many! 5000 cards are sent each day minimum) connections. I can't store in each row all the user info each time he changes the background, but i need to store all the backgrounds he used (that's why i choose this subject: I need to know what the user is doing and how. Should I call this a comportemental study?).

        Doing complex inserts (in more than one table) is not possible (IMHO). I could simply insert userinfo in one table, and log activity for this user (using 1 cookie) in another table but I think it might be too slow... Or maybe the speed of Mysql is great enough to handle many inserts/seconds (!) without slowing down too much the webserver (a SUN SPARCStation)

        How would you efficiently store (data type/structure) a list of backgrounds, musics, email (...) in a database (along with non-historical information)? I can't use the SET rowtype because the sets are subject to change all the time, and I can't just recreate the tables each month.

I appreciate any advice. If I wasn't clear enough, I would be glad to give more information.

Thanks!
Guilhem Received on Tue Jan 25 2000 - 00:00:00 CET