ASP.NET Maintaining Search History in an application

Recently i received an interview question.

How to maintain search day to day search history in an asp.net application?

Which one of the be开发者_运维百科low would be the right choice?

1)Cookies 2) Sql Server 3) Session State

I guess the correct option could be Cookies.Please kindly share your thought.

SQL Server is the most reliable way of maintaining whatever. Cookies cannot generally be relied upon, and sessions expire and lose all data.

So the question boils down to: if you need to mainain long-term historical records, go with SQL Server. If you want to show what a particular user has searched for, go for session (or cookies, but they're somewhat size-limited).

All 3 options are acceptable in different scenarios for many different reasons - it's a softener question designed to get you thinking and talking:

(1) Cookies - for a per user / browser session provides a client-side solution (provided the user accepts / does not delete them) and you don't care that this can happen. However, this does tie the user to the browser. Useful for anonymous per-user browsing but not if your intention is to keep or query the history.

(2) SQL - guarantees history is saved server side but you would need a mechanism such as a client login to associate the history with the user and the only solution of the 3 presented that would allow you to perform any sort of historical multi-user analysis / analytics.

(3) Session state - not advisable - but arguably similar to cookies but without the caveat that cookie acceptance is required - however you introduce the timeout issue and again tie the user to the browser and limited lifetime of the information.