I've written a component in my web content system that will track website statistics and store them in a MySQL database. I'm wondering if anyone thinks this is a bad idea and if so, what a better way to store this data would be. I know most web servers store this data themselves, but I'm not sure there's a common storage format across all web servers and even if there is, whether or not a client's host will allow access to those logs. The long and short of it is that I need to do this myself to maintain the application's independance from the hosting solution. One of my biggest concerns is that the table storing this data would explode in size in a very short time. So I guess another question is would you set up a script to trim the database occassionally or maybe setup an interface allowing the user to do it manually.
