Retrieve constantly from database - php

Question

I am doing this animation tool where I fetch a value from my database and then a picture will animate to a certain position. My question is if it is possible to retrieve data constantly or like every 5 seconds?
Somehow like this:
while(autoretreive){
$data = mysql_query("select * from ......");
}
UPDATED from here
Thanks for your answers! Made it a little bit clearer what to do! Maybe I can explain better what I'm doing in my code.
I am doing this animation program as said, where balls with information is moving around to different locations. I have one value that will be updated frequently in the database, lets call it 'city'.
First at previous page I post the balls of information I want based on the 'city' and I do like this (simplified):
$pid = $_POST['id'];
$pcity[0] = $_POST['city'];
$pcity[1] = $_POST['city'];
$pcity[2] = $_POST['city'];
//...
$while(autoretrieve) { // HOW TO?
$data = mysql_query(select * from table where city == $pcity[0] OR $pcity == [1] //...);
while($rows = mysql_fetch_array($data)){
$city = $rows['city'];
$id = $rows['id'];
if($city == example1){
"animate to certain pos"; //attached to image
}
else if($city == example2){
"animate to certain pos"; //attached to image
}
}
}
So for every update in the database the image will animate to a new position. So a time interval of 5 seconds would be great. I'm not an expert in coding so sorry for deprecated code. Not so familiar with AJAX either so what is going to be imported to the code? It is also important that the page is not reloading. Just the fetch from database.

Answer 1

you can do it with ajax and javascript
make one javascript function which contains ajax code to retrive data from database
and at your page load using setTimeout call your ajax function at every 5 second

Answer 2

You can use sleep function to control how often you want to fetch data.
while(autoretreive){
$data = mysql_query("select * from ......");
//output your data here, check more in link about server sent events bellow
sleep(5);
}
Since you haven't specified how you plan to access data I'm writing this answer assuming Server-Sent Events as they are only ones that make sense according to your question.
Now all this was according to your question which wasn't very clear on how do you plan to use data. Again you'll most likely want to fetch data using ajax, but Server Sent Events can also be a good way you could achieve this.
And don't use mysql_* it's deprecated, switch to PDO or mysqli_*