PHP PDO sqlsrv large result set inconsistency - php

Question

I am using PDO to execute a query for which I am expecting ~500K results. This is my query:
SELECT Email FROM mytable WHERE flag = 1
When I run the query in Microsoft SQL Server management Studio I consistently get 544838 results. I wanted to write a small script in PHP that would fetch these results for me. My original implementation used fetchAll(), but this was exhausting the memory available to php, so I decided to fetch the results one at a time like so:
$q = <<<QUERY
SELECT Email FROM mytable WHERE flag = 1
QUERY;
$stmt = $conn->prepare($q);
$stmt->execute();
$c = 0;
while ($email = $stmt->fetch()[0]) {
echo $email." $c\n";
$c++;
}
but each time I run the query, I get a different number of results! Typical results are:
445664
445836
445979
The number of results seems to be short 100K +/- 200 ish. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

fetch() method fetches one row at a time from current result set. $stmt->fetch()[0] is the first column of the current row.
Your sql query has no ordering and can have some null or empty values (probably).
Since you are controlling this column value in while loop, if the current row's first value is null, it will exit from the loop.
Therefore, you should control only fetch(), not fetch()[0] or something like that.
Also, inside the while loop, use sqlsrv_get_field() to access the columns by index.
$c = 0;
while ($stmt->fetch()) { // You may want to control errors
$email = sqlsrv_get_field($stmt, 0); // get first column value
// $email can be false on errors
echo $email . " $c\n";
$c++;
}
sqlsrv_fetch