How to implement Foursquare's "Mayor" feature - find the user with the highest score in the last N days?
In Foursquare, the user who has the highest score开发者_如何转开发 for a place in the last N days is awarded the Mayorship of that place.
What is the most efficient way to implement that?
A user could have checked into hundreds of places. To display all the mayorships that belong to a user, it'd be necessary to go through all those hundreds of places one by one and check if he has the highest score in the last 60 days for each place-- that sounds very inefficient.
Is there any SQL or algorithmic magic that could perform the task quickly?
UPDATE: I'm using MySQL and Django
I would keep the 'current major' in the place table, and update that from time to time. Example (I have no idea if the data model is correct):
drop table place;
create table place(name varchar(20) primary key, major varchar(20));
insert into place values('NY', null), ('LA', null);
create index idx_p_m on place(major);
drop table visits;
create table visits(user varchar(20), place varchar(20), points int, day int);
create index idx_v_p on visits(place, day desc);
insert into visits values
('Ben', 'NY', 1, 100),
('Ben', 'LA', 3, 102),
('Joe', 'NY', 2, 103),
('Joe', 'LA', 1, 104);
-- just to prove this is efficient
explain select user from visits v where v.place = 'NY'
and day > 90
group by user
order by sum(points) desc
limit 1;
update place p set major =
(select user from visits v where p.name = v.place
and day > 90
group by user
order by sum(points) desc
limit 1);
select * from place where major = 'Joe';
select * from place where name = 'LA';
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