[SOLVED] Which way is the 'best'?

[skulk]

I wanted to port a VB program of mine to PHP, and had a coupla doubts. The site will have a membership system, with a new line (or more) of data being associated with (nearly) every member on a daily basis. I was wondering how to go about storing that data (all the data since inception till current, would also need to be aggregated each time the user logs in):

1. I thought of having a table for every user, but i guess that would lead to a huge database, and slow the whole site down.

2. Have a single table and store every users info in that and parse the table each time, again as time goes by that table would be enormous and become slow again.

3. Store a separate file for every user and when the user logs on create a temp table and copy the csv contents to it and then proceed. According to me this would be the best, am I correct? If everything is stored in csv's, is ther a way to prevent a user from guessing the address and filename and accessing all the data?

Sorry about the long post, hope it makes sense.

[zipp]

Using #3.

 

I may be wrong, but if you are using php, you can store the data in a directory unaccessible to the public. What I mean by this is store the csv files in "www/userdata" instead of "www/public_html" or there abouts.

 

You could also try a ".htaccess" file.