Let's say I am running a small vote counter product. The values are stored in the database "content", with a row containing the amount of votes ("count"), I also have a row called "rank", how would I autosum these values so that I don't have to iterate through every single one in PHP, causing the script to slow down tremendously?
If you have a structure like this in a table
item with fields: name, id, count, ...
you can simply do:
Up vote in the item with id = $id
UPDATE item SET count = count + 1 WHERE id='$id';
Down vote in the item with id = $id
UPDATE item SET count = count - 1 WHERE id='$id';
count will store the total number of votes.
If you want to check for avoiding more than one vote per user/ip you should store each individual vote in another table and check this aditional table for non repeated votes before sending the previous queries.