I'm sorry Vincent I'm not exactly sure what you are proposing. Are you proposing that I add another table in addition to what I already have that all the other tables JOIN to and add a state field in that parent table? How is that different than what I have except now I have a new table with an updatable state field? Maybe you can show a query or two to more specifically show what you are suggesting?
Right now this seems like a simple way to get the last time John was called:
// last answered called for John
SELECT MAX(a.answered)
FROM calls_answered a JOIN calls c ON
c.id =
a.id WHERE c.user = John;
If I don't have a calls_answered table I'm not sure how I would get this information if I had a single table with a mutable state. Unless you are suggesting denormalizing all the tables into one table that would have a lot of null fields. For example answered_date would be null if the call was never answered.
