More efficient way to perform multiple MySQL queries in PHP - php

Question

I have an online store with thousands of orders and I'm writing some queries to figure out how much money each supplier (brand) has made on the site. I have the following queries, one for every month of the selected year:
$filterJan = "$filterYear-01";
$queryJan = "SELECT price, quantity FROM order_items WHERE productID='$productID' AND timestamp LIKE '%$filterJan%' LIMIT 10000";
$suppliersQueryFilter = mysql_query($queryJan, $connection) or die(mysql_error());
while($rowF = mysql_fetch_assoc($suppliersQueryFilter)) {
$price = $rowF["price"]*$rowF["quantity"];
$totalJan = $totalJan+$price;
}
** and so on for each month **
It takes ages to load (we're talking over 60 seconds at least) and I know it is not efficient in any shape or form. For each month these queries are searching through thousands of records. Is there a more efficient way or writing this to:
a) Reduce the amount of code to maybe 1 query
b) Make it more efficient to increase loading times
$filterYear contains a year, like 2009.
So what this query does is it selects how much money has been made for each month for a selected year (which is assigned to $filterYear). So the result it generates is a table with Jan, Feb, March... with how much money has been made each month, so £2345, £2101, etc...

Answer 1

You should be storing your timestamp as an actual mysql datetime value, which would make things like
GROUP BY YEAR(timestamp), MONTH(timestamp)
WHERE timestamp BETWEEN $initialtime AND $finaltime
trivially possible. That'd reduce your multiple essentially identical repeated queries to just one single query.
You can use derived values for this, but it'll be less efficient than using a native datetime field:
GROUP BY SUBSTR(timestamp, 0, 4), SUBSTR(timestamp, 6,2)

Answer 2

For best performance, you'd want to submit a query something like this to the database:
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(i.timestamp,'%Y-%m') AS `month`
, SUM(i.price*i.qty) AS `total`
FROM order_items i
WHERE i.productID = 'foo'
AND i.timestamp >= '2013-01-01'
AND i.timestamp < '2013-01-01' + INTERVAL 12 MONTH
GROUP
BY DATE_FORMAT(i.timestamp,'%Y-%m')
(This assumes that the timestamp column is MySQL datatype TIMESTAMP, DATETIME or DATE)
Using the deprecated mysql_ interface, you want to avoid SQL Injection vulnerabilities using the mysql_real_escape_string function. (A better option would be to use the mysqli or PDO interface, and use a prepared statement with bind placeholders.)
We want the predicates on the timestamp to be on the BARE column, so MySQL can make use of an available suitable index for a range scan operation, rather than requiring a full scan of every row in the table.
We also want to use the power of the server to quickly derive a total, and return just the total, rather than retrieving every flipping row, and processing each of those rows individually (RBAR = row by agonizing row)
The GROUP BY clause and the SUM() aggregate function are tailor made to suit this result.
With mysql_ interface, the query would look something like this:
$querytext = "
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(i.timestamp,'%Y-%m') AS `month`
, SUM(i.price*i.qty) AS `total`
FROM order_items i
WHERE i.productID = '" . mysql_real_escape_string($thisProductID) . "'
AND i.timestamp >= '" . mysql_real_escape_string($filterYear) . "-01-01'
AND i.timestamp < '" . mysql_real_escape_string($filterYear) . "-01-01' +
INTERVAL 12 MONTH
GROUP BY DATE_FORMAT(i.timestamp,'%Y-%m')";
# for debugging
#echo $querytext;