Optimizing query with large result set - php

Question

I have a CakePHP model, let's call it Thing which has an associated model called ItemView. ItemView represents one page view of the Thing item. I want to display how many times Thing has been viewed, so I do the following in my view:
<?php echo count($thing['ItemView']); ?>
This works, however as time goes on the result set of this query is going to get huge, as it's currently being returned like so:
array(
'Thing' => array(
'id' => '1',
'thing' => 'something'
),
'ItemView' => array(
(int) 0 => array(
'id' => '1',
'thing_id' => 1,
'created' => '2013-09-21 19:25:39',
'ip_address' => '127.0.0.1'
),
(int) 1 => array(
'id' => '1',
'thing_id' => 1,
'created' => '2013-09-21 19:25:41',
'ip_address' => '127.0.0.1'
),
// etc...
)
)
How can I adapt the model find() to retrieve something like so:
array(
'Thing' => array(
'id' => '1',
'thing' => 'something',
'views' => 2
)
)
without loading the entire ItemView relation into memory?
Thanks!

Answer 1

So it's pretty straight forward, we can make use of countercache - Cake does the counting for you whenever a record is added into/deleted fromItemView:
Nothing to change in your Thing.php model
Add a new INT column views in your things table.
In your ItemView.php model, add counterCache like this:
public $belongsTo = array(
'Thing' => array(
'counterCache' => 'views'
)
);
Then next time when you do addition/deletion via ItemView, Cake will automatically recalculate the counting and cache into views for you, so the next time when you do the query, you also need to make sure you specify recursive = -1 as what #Paco Car has suggested in his answer:
$this->Thing->recursive = -1;
$this->Thing->find(...); //this will returns array of Thing + the field "views"
// --- OR ---
$this->Thing->find(array(
'conditions' => array(
//... your usual conditions here
),
//... fields, order... etc
//this will make sure the recursive applies to this call, once only.
'recursive' => -1
);