Daily post count out of a timestamp column - php

Question

My application is built using Laravel 4.1 and supports pretty much all databases that Laravel officially does today. I have an INT(10) column that stores the Unix timestamp for each "post" to indicate the create time of the post.
Is there a way I can get the daily number of posts out of this sort of setup? Basically, I want to make a graph out of Google Chart API to indicate the trend of number of posts made per day for the last 1 month.
Also, I am not looking for a solution around DB::raw(), I'd prefer using the query builder.

Answer 1

If you want to perform an aggregation on the db-side IMHO you'll have to use DB::raw() because you need to manipulate your timestamp values.
If understand correctly your major concern is not in using DB::raw() method but rather not using vendor specific datetime functions (like FROM_UNIXTIME() in MySQL).
You can issue a query like this to get aggregated results in an almost db agnostic way (AFAIK all major DBMSes have implementation for FLOOR() function)
SELECT FLOOR(timestamp / 86400) AS date , COUNT(*) AS total
FROM post
GROUP BY FLOOR(timestamp / 86400)
which translates into something like this with Query Builder
$result = DB::table('posts')
->select(DB::raw('FLOOR(timestamp / 86400) AS date, COUNT(*) AS total'))
->groupBy(DB::raw('FLOOR(timestamp / 86400) AS date, COUNT(*) AS total'))
->get();
Sample output:
| DATE | TOTAL |
|-------|-------|
| 16081 | 2 |
| 16082 | 3 |
Here is SQLFiddle demo
And then in the client code convert date column value into a human readable form by
date('m/d/Y', 16081 * 86400)
while you iterate over the resultset.

Answer 2

Firstly, you should probably using Laravel's built in timestamps for created_at and updated_at columns. If you don't want to use Laravel's built in timestamps, you should at least be setting your timestamp columns to the timestamp datatype rather than int.
With that said, the raw SQL you'd probably want to use for something like this would look a bit like;
SELECT DATE(timestamp_column_name) as day, count(*) as post_count from posts group by day order by day asc;
There's no real, pure Eloquent way of doing this. Something like the following is going to be as close as you'll get.
Post::groupBy('day')->get([
DB::raw('DATE(FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp_column_name)) as day'),
DB::raw('count(*) as post_count')
]);
This will return two columns, day being the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, and post_count being an integer with the count.
===========
In the above example, I am using the MySQL DATE function. You can of course manipulate your timestamp column however you want however you want. This just seemed to make the most sense to me.