I've been asked to create a bespoke advertisement system despite suggesting open source alternatives such as OpenX and DoubleClick for Publishers (the former Google Ad Manager).

I've got the basics of the system set up, i.e. uploading creatives, creating positions and a mechanism to place creatives within positions; however, the area I'm stuck with is impression and click tracking.

At the moment an impression and click is stored with the creative, but this then means impressions/clicks can't be queried. For example, we can't find how many impressions were in position x between date y and date z.

How would I go about storing that kind of data? My theory was store the creative ID, position ID and timestamp in a database table, but given the amount of traffic the site has this would produce a very large database very quickly.

If any one could give me a pointer or two, that would be great.