# Store a single variable / row in database

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 4, 2010, 7:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414 "2010-09-04T19:26:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9a140/32.png) [@voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/voxom)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2010, 7:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414/1 "2010-09-04T19:26:31Z")

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What would be the best way in rails to store a single variable and have  
it persist. Like a have a variable that says “total\_visits” that counts  
the total number of page loads.

The only solution I can think of is having a table with a single row.

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**Author:** ![voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9a140/32.png) [@voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/voxom)\
**Post date:** [September 5, 2010, 12:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414/2 "2010-09-05T00:08:09Z")

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> What would be the best way in rails to store a single variable and have  
> it persist. Like a have a variable that says “total\_visits” that counts  
> the total number of page loads.
> 
> The only solution I can think of is having a table with a single row.

One answer would be yes, pretty much if you really want to store a  
single data point that’s accessible to a number of instances of Rails,  
then either a file or a database is what you’ll need to use (assuming  
you don’t trust anything RAM based).

However, your specific scenario could quickly become an extreme  
bottleneck. It would be better served by logging (preferably  
asynchronously), and then read & tally the log to create your total. Do  
it periodically, so you’re not starting from the first log every every  
time.

There’s probably other ways, but using a single var for something like  
page loads is looking for trouble as your app scales. If you know the  
page requests will be low enough to not be a bottleneck then using the  
DB with row or table locking (effectively the same for this case) might  
be OK.

Another option if you can tolerate the potential for a little inaccuracy  
is to go ahead and use RAM (with a mutex) to keep the count, and  
periodically write that value to disk to minimize the disk access. If  
you have load balanced app servers you’ll need a central RAM cache like  
memcache.

That’s what comes to my mind – others may have better ideas.

– gw

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**Author:** ![voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9a140/32.png) [@voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/voxom)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2010, 4:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414/3 "2010-09-06T16:39:24Z")

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IMHO The biggest problem with rails is the fact that it makes working  
easy and fun as long as your work can follow the MVC system. If you  
try to do it your way it won’t be the rails way (at least as far as I  
know).

If you want to track any more information other then number of pages  
views, create a page\_view model and give it some logic to do the rest  
of your magic. If you want to track views of a specific model, add a  
page\_views field to that model. If you just want to track the number  
of page views on your entire website… use an analytics program 🙂

Brian

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9a140/32.png) [@voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/voxom)\
**Post date:** [September 5, 2010, 12:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414/4 "2010-09-05T00:19:13Z")

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Well, specifically what it would be for is an app which parses /  
collects stats on twitter. I want to have a persistant of the ID  
(twitter side) of the most recent parsed tweet, so I know where to start  
at the next startup, or in case it gets interrupted.

I don’t what to log every tweet I parse to the database (there are tens  
of thousands), nor do I need to.

So a single-row table would be the best way to do this?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9a140/32.png) [@voxom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/voxom)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2010, 4:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/store-a-single-variable-row-in-database/194414/5 "2010-09-06T16:39:32Z")

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change your question to

how can count the total number of page loads for … ?

For what?