What is the generic way of storing the status of walkthroughs/user guides?

There are many web applications (almost all) that have a walkthrough/user guide that is shown when the user first lands on the feature page.

What is the generic or most common way of storing the status of this walkthrough ?

The only way I could think of was to store the status (a boolean flag) in the database whenever a user acknowledges the user guide and on page load we check for this entry. Unfortunately, seems like a db call on every page load. Also, when the feature is old (maybe after a year), the call and data seems worthless.

Seems like a very common problem which all applications should face. Is the flag and DB the only solution or can such information be stored in the browser/device ?