I have a database in which i've got a table where im having question to be displayed randomly on the main site (about 80 for now). Im reading all the IDs from the database and then randomly selecting one and doing next query to get all the rest needed data of this one. And im curious if should i leave this like that or would it be bether to store all the IDs in .json file and just update it every time i add a question. What is bether? Thanks for help.
If you're just interested in a random record from the table, just do it like this:
SELECT * FROM your_table
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1;
All in one query and you don't have to retrieve a list of IDs first.
And it's almost always a bad idea to maintain two separate data sources.
Related
I'm new to sql & php and unsure about how to proceed in this situation:
I created a mysql database with two tables.
One is just a list of users with their data, each having a unique id.
The second one awards certain amounts of points to users, with relevant columns being the user id and the amount of awarded points. This table is supposed to get new entries regularly and there's no limit to how many times a single user can appear in it.
On my php page I now want to display a list of users sorted by their point total.
My first approach was creating a "points_total" column in the user table, intending to run some kind of query that would calculate and update the correct total for each user every time new entries are added to the other table. To retrieve the data I could then use a very simple query and even use sql's sort features.
However, while it's easy to update the total for a specific user with the sum where function, I don't see a way to do that for the whole user table. After all, plain sql doesn't offer the ability to iterate over each row of a table, or am I missing a different way?
I could probably do the update by going over the table in php, but then again, I'm not sure if that is even a good approach in the first place, because in a way storing the point data twice (the total in one table and then the point breakdown with some additional information in a different table) seems redundant.
A different option would be forgoing the extra column, and instead calculating the sums everytime the php page is accessed, then doing the sorting stuff with php. However, I suppose this would be much slower than having the data ready in the database, which could be a problem if the tables have a lot of entries?
I'm a bit lost here so any advice would be appreciated.
To get the total points awarded, you could use a query similar to this:
SELECT
`user_name`,
`user_id`,
SUM(`points`.`points_award`) as `points`,
COUNT(`points`.`points_award`) as `numberOfAwards`
FROM `users`
JOIN `points`
ON `users`.`user_id` = `points`.`user_id`
GROUP BY `users`.`user_id`
ORDER BY `users`.`user_name` // or whatever users column you want.
I build a like system for a website and I'm front of a dilemma.
I have a table where all the items which can be liked are stored. Call it the "item table".
In order to preserve the speed of the server, do I have to :
add a column in the item table.
It means that I have to search (with a regex in my PHP) inside a string where all the ID of the users who have liked the item are registered, each time a user like an item. This in order verify if the user in question has (or not) already liked the item before. In this case, I show a different button on my html.
Problem > If I have (by chance) 3000 liked on an item, I fear the string to begin very big and heavy to regex each time ther is a like
on it...
add a specific new table (LikedBy) and record each like separately with the ID of the liker, the name of the item and the state of the like (liked or not).
Problem > In this case, I fear for the MySQL server with thousand of rows to analyze each time a new user like one popular item...
Server version: 5.5.36-cll-lve MySQL Community Server (GPL) by Atomicorp
Should I put the load on the PHP script or the MySql Database? What is the most performant (and scalable)?
If, for some reasons, my question does not make sens could anyone tell me the right way to do the trick?
thx.
You have to create another table call it likes_table containing id_user int, id_item int that's how it should be done, if you do like your proposed first solution your database won't be normalized and you'll face too many issues in the future.
To get count of like you just have to
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM likes_table WHERE id_item='id_item_you_are_looking_for';
To get who liked what:
SELECT id_item FROM likes_table WHERE id_user='id_user_you_are_looking_for';
No regex needed nothing, and your database is well normalized for data to be found easily. You can tell mysql to index id_user and id_item making them unique in likes_table this way all your queries will run much faster
With MySQL you can set the user ID and the item ID as a unique pair. This should improve performance by a lot.
Your table would have these 2 columns: item id, and user id. Every row would be a like.
First of, I'm pretty new to this site and coding in general so please explain in simple terms as I'm still learning! Thanks
Ok, so I've got a database of results. These are 1-6 ratings. I've already created the ability to retrieve certain results (user, group, all).
But now I'm wanting to alongside retrieving the group and all results to display at the top of the results a mean for each question.
So to start I'm wanting something like this I believe.
SELECT sum(r1), sum(r2), sum(r3) so on,
FROM table
This is where I get confused.
I think I'd need a variable to contain these and then another that counts the amount of entries to divide the total of r1 hence the mean.
Any ideas?..
To calculate a mean, use the AVG function, e.g.
SELECT AVG(r1), AVG(r2)
FROM table
See the MySQL docs.
I have recently written a survey application that has done it's job and all the data is gathered. Now i have to analyze the data and i'm having some time issues.
I have to find out how many people selected what option and display it all.
I'm using this query, which does do it's job:
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM survey
WHERE users = ? AND table = ? AND col = ? AND row = ? AND selected = ?
GROUP BY users,table,col,row,selected
As evident by the "?" i'm using MySQLi (in php) to fetch the data when needed, but i fear this is causing it to be so slow.
The table consists of all the elements above (+ an unique ID) and all of them are integers.
To explain some of the fields:
Each survey was divided into 3 or 4 tables (sized from 2x3 to 5x5) with a 1 to 10 happiness grade to select form. (questions are on the right and top of the table, then you answer where the questions intersect)
users - age groups
table, row, col - explained above
selected - dooooh explained above
Now with the surveys complete and around 1 million entries in the table the query is getting very slow. Sometimes it takes like 3 minutes, sometimes (i guess) the time limit expires and you get no data at all. I also don't have access to the full database, just my empty "testing" one since the costumer is kinda paranoid :S (and his server seems to be a bit slow)
Now (after the initial essay) my questions are: I left indexing out intentionally because with a lot of data being written during the survey, it would be a bad idea. But since no new data is coming in at this point, would it make sense to index all the fields of a table? How much sense does it make to index integers that never go above 10? (as you can guess i haven't got a clue about indexes). Do i need the primary unique ID in this table? I
I read somewhere that indexing may help groups but only if you group by the first columns in a table (and since my ID is first and from my point of view useless can i remove it and gain anything by it?)
Is there another way to write my query that would basically do the same thing but in a shorter period of time?
Thanks for all your suggestions in advance!
Add an index on entries that you "GROUP BY" or do "WHERE". So that's ONE index incorporating users,table,col,row and selected in your case.
Some quick rules:
combine fields to have the WHERE first, and the GROUP BY elements last.
If you have other queries that only use part of it (e.g. users,table,col and selected) then leave the missing value (row, in this example) last.
Don't use too many indexes/indeces, as each will slow the table to updates marginally - so on really large system you need to balance queries with indexes.
Edit: do you need the GROUP BY user,col,row as these are used in the WHERE. If the WHERE has already filtered them out, you only need group by "selected".
I'm running a sql query to get basic details from a number of tables. Sorted by the last update date field. Its terribly tricky and I'm thinking if there is an alternate to using the UNION clause instead...I'm working in PHP MYSQL.
Actually I have a few tables containing news, articles, photos, events etc and need to collect all of them in one query to show a simple - whats newly added on the website kind of thing.
Maybe do it in PHP rather than MySQL - if you want the latest n items, then fetch the latest n of each of your news items, articles, photos and events, and sort in PHP (you'll need the last n of each obviously, and you'll then trim the dataset in PHP). This is probably easier than combining those with UNION given they're likely to have lots of data items which are different.
I'm not aware of an alternative to UNION that does what you want, and hopefully those fetches won't be too expensive. It would definitely be wise to profile this though.
If you use Join in your query you can select datas from differents tables who are related with foreign keys.
You can look of this from another angle: do you need absolutely updated information? (the moment someone enters new information it should appear)
If not, you can have a table holding the results of the query in the format you need (serving as cache), and update this table every 5 minutes or so. Then your query problem becomes trivial, as you can have the updates run as several updates in the background.