A simple explanation of what I am inquiring about would be Perlmonks voting. Somehow, it has saved every single vote I have ever made and can (quickly) calculate sums for nodes and display voting options for nodes which I have not voted for.
This seems like there would be literally hundreds of thousands of rows if a single mySQL table was used, with one row per vote. How does Perlmonks keep track? What are the speeds involved? Is there a place which I might find the schema of the database tables used here for Perlmonks? I feel I would learn a great deal from these.