Best way to store chat messages in a database? [closed]

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I'm building a chat app and I want a full history off all messages ever sent in the chat conversation. At the moment I am storing each message as a single row in a table called 'messages'. I am aware that this table could grow huge as even small messages like 'Hi' would have their own database record.

Can anyone recommend a more scalable mysql solution? I don't require the individual messages to be searchable, editable or deletable. Could the whole conversation be stored in one huge field?

Would love to hear your ideas!

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There's nothing wrong with saving the whole history in the database, they are prepared for that kind of tasks.

Actually you can find here in Stack Overflow a link to an example schema for a chat: example

If you are still worried for the size, you could apply some optimizations to group messages, like adding a buffer to your application that you only push after some time (like 1 minute or so); that way you would avoid having only 1 line messages

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If we assume that you do not read the data too.

This sounds to me like an audit\logging requirement, if it is, you do not need a database to store the chat messages.

Just append the conversation to a text file (1 file per day?). The file could look like this:

chat-1-bob 201101011029, hi
chat-1-jen 201101011030, how are you?
chat-1-bob 201101011030, fine thanks.    
chat-1-jen 201101011035, have you spoken to bill recently?    
chat-2-bob 201101021200, hi
chat-2-bill 201101021201, Hey Bob,
chat-2-bill 201101021203, what time do you call this?
chat-2-bob 201101021222, about 12:22

I think you will find it hard to get a more simple scaleable audit solution.

If your requirements change and you need to search\edit\delete then a database would be more appropriate.

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You could create a database for x conversations which contains all messages of these conversations. This would allow you to add a new Database (or server) each time x exceeds. X is the number conversations your infrastructure supports (depending on your hardware,...).

The problem is still, that there may be big conversations (with a lot of messages) on the same database. e.g. you have database A and database B an each stores e.g. 1000 conversations. It my be possible that there are far more "big" conversations on server A than on server B (since this is user created content). You could add a "master" database that contains a lookup, on which database/server the single conversations can be found (or you have a schema to assign a database from hash/modulo or something).

Maybe you can find real world architectures that deal with the same problems (you may not be the first one), and that have already been solved.