Q:

Show data from multiple tables by date and time

I have these tables: Idea and poll (and others) which are types of what can a member post within a community. I need to show them all in the "Activity stream" ordered by time and date, so a member can see in his "Activity stream" all what others have posted whatever is the type. I've looked around and have found to use the UNION, however they said this way is too slow. I thought to create another table named posts that contains the ID of the post and its time and date, updated in each new post. But either this way costs me a new table. What do you think is the best way? Any other suggestion will be appreciated.

A:

Yes it is, like "Tom asked a question:__ in:__ few minutes a go"

So you need a user name, an action, a timestamp and a hidden id.
Well performance-wise a separate table is better (you avoid unions and maybe joins if it's not necessary to be mormalized), but you have the extra storage (is this an issue?) and the overhead of inserting new records to this table (tiny). Be aware for the usage of a switch to get the details of each activity from its origin table.
Bottom line everything depends on the data volume and the traffic.

