Hey, have you ever struggled with designing a database structure for a social media app? I came across a Reddit post that sparked an interesting discussion about content aggregation patterns. The author is building leaderboards for Feed and Story content in a NestJS app using MySQL. They’re debating between creating a unified Content cache table or querying the original tables directly.
The unified cache table approach seems appealing, with benefits like fast leaderboard queries, unified ranking, and easy time-based filtering for contests. However, it raises concerns about data duplication, sync complexity, and additional storage overhead.
On the other hand, querying the Feed and Story tables directly using UNION queries could be a viable alternative. But how do we handle counter synchronization, and at what point does denormalization become necessary?
The author is seeking advice on performance, maintenance, scaling, architecture, and alternative solutions. They’re wondering if they’re overengineering the system and if there are better patterns for handling this ‘unified content’ problem.
As I read through the post, I realized that this is a common dilemma many developers face when designing database structures. It’s a tradeoff between performance, complexity, and scalability. What do you think? Would you opt for a unified cache table or direct queries? Share your thoughts!
If you’re interested in learning more about the pros and cons of each approach, I’d recommend checking out the original Reddit post and the comments section.