Hi, I'm creating a stats script for a webpage and I've ran into a problem when storing the data. For example I want to log which browser plugins the visitors have, but I don't know how to store it. The most natural way to do it is to have a "Plugin" table with a "date" column and one column for each plugin and then add 1 in the right column/date. But the problem is that I don't know which plugins the users have, so that table would have to grow on the width, which for me seems a bit "ugly" Do you have any ideas?

Maybe you could have a "Plugin" table with plugin-id and plugin-name and a table with "date","plugin-id","count" ? then you would get a row per date and plugin which is not very good since I want to save hourly stats, which makes #plugins*24*365=#plugins*8760 rows/year (#plugins ~= 10-15), is it too much? any other brilliant ideas?

can't you just use your second colution and periodically dump the data from the db? just tally it all up once a month and dump that data out and then you've cut the number of rows by a factor of 12. hell, do it once a week if you need to.

It appears you are confusing data collection with data reporting.
CREATE TABLE WEB_ACCESS
(
PLUGIN_NAME VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
ACCESS_TIME DATETIME NOTNULL
);

This table get 1 record for each access.
You can report the results any which way is required with simple SQL.

thanks for the replies! sounds like a good idea to dump it to the disc.. the only bad thing is that the user will have to do it every once in a while.. or maybe you can force him to do it.. can't take too long to dump it.. hmm.. we'll see..