Storing Votes inside db or file?

[chick3n]

I have a simple voting system where users will vote for a site good bad whatever.

What i want to do is beyond just storing a vote for good, a vote for bad, i want to store the username that voted, ip, and date.

What i want to know is how would be the best way to store this data? Using a sql table or a simple plain text file.

Im looking at 200 sites being listed and each site can range from 30-1000 votes.

So if i did do this the way of a db would i create a db called 'votes' and than for each individual site create a table based on that site id giving each site its own unique table?

If that would be the best way to do it great, but i was thinking having 200+ tables can become excessive but i know nothing about DB architecture and design so that may not be excessive at all.

Anyways any input on designing this would be appreciated.

[devinemke]

use a database. create 3 tables:

users
user_id
name
email

sites
site_id
url

votes
vote_id
date_time
user_id
user_ip
site_id
vote (perhaps an enum field: "bad","avergae","good","excellent")

each user has a unique record in the users table, each site in the site table. each vote is stored in the votes table that relates to the user_id and site_id.

[chick3n]

Yes i see that, thanks devinemke.

So when i want to grab the votes related to a certain site its basically

SELECT * FROM votes
WHERE siteid='$selectedsite'
LIMIT 30 DES

that would show the last 30 votes am i correct?

[devinemke]

yes, or perhaps you want to see every vote cast by user #38:

SELECT * FROM votes WHERE user_id = 38