I am making a simple message board in PHP with a MySQL database. I have limited messages to 20 a page with the 'LIMIT' operation.
An example of my URL is: http://www.example.com/?page=1
If page is not specified, it defaults to 1. As I mentioned earlier, there is a limit of 20 per page, however if that is out of a possible 30 and I wish to view page 2, I only end up with 10 results. In this case, the LIMIT part of my query resembles LIMIT 20,40 - How can I ensure in this case that 20 are returned?
I would prefer to try and keep this as much on the MySQL side as possible.
EDIT:
To clarify, if I am on page 2, I will be fetching rows 20-30, however this is only 10 rows, so I wish to select 10-30 instead.
EDIT:
I am currently using the following query:
My query:
SELECT MOD(COUNT(`ID`),20) AS lmt WHERE `threadID`=2;
SELECT * FROM `msg_messages` WHERE `threadID`=2 LIMIT 20-(20-lmt) , 40-(20-lmt) ;
There are 30 records this matches.
I'm not sure to really understand the question, but if I do I think that the best practive would be to prevent users to go to a page with no results. To do so, you can easily check how many rows you have in total even if you are using the "LIMIT" clause using SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS.
For example you could do:
Select SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS * from blog_posts where balblabla...
Then you have to run another query like this:
Select FOUND_ROWS() as posts_count
It will return the total rows very quickly. With this result and knowing the current page, you can decide if you display next/prev links to the user.
You could do a:
SELECT COUNT(*)/20 AS pages FROM tbl;
..to get the max number of pages, then work out if you're going to be left with a partial set and adjust your paging query accordingly.
Related
This is a problem with a ordering search results on my website,
When a search is made, random results appear on the content page, this page includes pagination too. I user following as my SQL query.
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,10;
so my questions are
I need to make sure that everytime user visits the next page, results they already seen not to appear again (exclude them in the next query, in a memory efficient way but still order by rand() )
everytime the visitor goes to the 1st page there is a different sets of results, Is it possible to use pagination with this, or will the ordering always be random.
I can use seed in the MYSQL, however i am not sure how to use that practically ..
Use RAND(SEED). Quoting docs: "If a constant integer argument N is specified, it is used as the seed value." (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mathematical-functions.html#function_rand).
In the example above the result order is rand, but it is always the same. You can just change the seed to get a new order.
SELECT * FROM your_table ORDER BY RAND(351);
You can change the seed every time the user hits the first results page and store it in the user session.
Random ordering in MySQL is as sticky a problem as they come. In the past, I've usually chosen to go around the problem whenever possible. Typically, a user won't ever come back to a set of pages like this more than once or twice. So this gives you the opportunity to avoid all of the various disgusting implementations of random order in favor of a couple simple, but not quite 100% random solutions.
Solution 1
Pick from a number of existing columns that already indexed for being sorted on. This can include created on, modified timestamps, or any other column you may sort by. When a user first comes to the site, have these handy in an array, pick one at random, and then randomly pick ASC or DESC.
In your case, every time a user comes back to page 1, pick something new, store it in session. Every subsequent page, you can use that sort to generate a consistent set of paging.
Solution 2
You could have an additional column that stores a random number for sorting. It should be indexed, obviously. Periodically, run the following query;
UPDATE table SET rand_col = RAND();
This may not work for your specs, as you seem to require every user to see something different every time they hit page 1.
First you should stop using the ORDER BY RAND syntax. This will bad for performance in large set of rows.
You need to manually determine the LIMIT constraints. If you still want to use the random results and you don't want users to see the same results on next page the only way is to save all the result for this search session in database and manipulate this information when user navigate to next page.
The next thing in web design you should understand - using any random data blocks on your site is very, very, very bad for users visual perception.
You have several problems to deal with! I recommend that you go step by step.
First issue: results they already seen not to appear again
Every item returned, store it in one array. (assuming the index id on the example)
When the user goes to the next page, pass to the query the NOT IN:
MySQL Query
SELECT * FROM table WHERE id NOT IN (1, 14, 25, 645) ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,10;
What this does is to match all id that are not 1, 14, 25 or 645.
As far as the performance issue goes: in a memory efficient way
SELECT RAND( )
FROM table
WHERE id NOT
IN ( 1, 14, 25, 645 )
LIMIT 0 , 10
Showing rows 0 - 9 (10 total, Query took 0.0004 sec)
AND
SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE id NOT
IN ( 1, 14, 25, 645 )
ORDER BY RAND( )
LIMIT 0 , 10
Showing rows 0 - 9 (10 total, Query took 0.0609 sec)
So, don't use ORDER BY RAND(), preferably use SELECT RAND().
I would have your PHP generate your random record numbers or rows to retrieve, pass those to your query, and save a cookie on the user's client indicating what records they've already seen.
There's no reason for that user specific data to live on the server (unless you're tracking it, but it's random anyway so who cares).
The combination of
random ordering
pagination
HTTP (stateless)
is as ugly as it comes: 1. and 2. together need some sort of "persistent randomness", while 3. makes this harder to achieve. On top of this 1. is not a job a RDBMS is optimized to do.
My suggestion depends on how big your dataset is:
Few rows (ca. <1K):
select all PK values in first query (first page)
shuffle these in PHP
store shuffled list in session
for each page call select the data according to the stored PKs
Many rows (10K+):
This assumes, you have an AUTO_INCREMENT unique key called ID with a manageable number of holes. Use a amintenace script if needed (high delete ratio)
Use a shuffling function that is parameterized with e.g. the session ID to create a function rand_id(continuous_id)
If you need e.g. the records 100,000 to 100,009 calculate $a=array(rand_id(100,000), rand_id(100,001), ... rand_id(100,009));
$a=implode(',',$a);
$sql="SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE ID IN($a) ORDER BY FIELD(ID,$a)";
To take care of the holes in your ID select a few records too many (and throw away the exess), looping on too few records selected.
In my database, there's a field named comments that says how many comments are in a post. Until now, I've been using LIMIT with that specific amount while retrieving all the comments, but I worry that it may lead to inaccuracies if it's a popular post in which comments are added/deleted quickly.
My question is, while retrieving comments, let's say, is an upper boundary good to use? Do websites just query the entire table? I used LIMIT because I thought it would be a tad more efficient, but is there really a difference?
Thanks in advance.
You can use SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and FOUND_ROWS() instead of storing number of comments.
Example of select statement:
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS *
FROM comments
WHERE post_id = ?
ORDER BY id DESC
LIMIT 0, 10
When you run this query, you will get your comments, and right after that run query:
SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
than will return number of comments in previous query without LIMIT.
You can query the first 30 comments (lets say) using LIMIT, and the total comments that belong to your post using COUNT. Now, build up pagination links based on that count.
Now, whenever the user clicks the page number n, use AJAX to fetch the new comments and replace the existing comments. Use LIMIT along with OFFSET for this purpose.
This way, you won't need to pull up all your comments for that post in one go, and at the same time, will be able to provide your users with the required comments, if they need to read more..
Most popular sites, and I think WordPress, as well, uses this process.
UPDATE
If you are using load more kind of thing, you do not need to even run a COUNT query. Just load the first 30 comments, and an ajax based solution to fetch the next 30 queries, and rinse and repeat, unless the sql returns empty results.
The offset should be incremented by 30 (in this case) on every ajax request, but the limit should stay at 30 each time.
I have a simple query using server-side pagination. The issue is the WHERE Clause makes a call to an expensive function and the functions argument is the user input, eg. what the user is searching for.
SELECT
*
FROM
( SELECT /*+ FIRST_ROWS(numberOfRows) */
query.*,
ROWNUM rn FROM
(SELECT
myColumns
FROM
myTable
WHERE expensiveFunction(:userInput)=1
ORDER BY id ASC
) query
)
WHERE rn >= :startIndex
AND ROWNUM <= :numberOfRows
This works and is quick assuming numberOfRows is small. However I would also like to have the total row count of the query. Depending on the user input and database size the query can take up to minutes. My current approach is to cache this value but that still means the user needs to wait minutes to see first result.
The results should be displayed in the Jquery datatables plugin which greatly helps with things like serer-side paging. It however requires the server to return a value for the total records to correctly display paging controls.
What would be the best approach? (Note: PHP)
I thought if returning first page immediately with a fake (better would be estimated) row count. After the page is loaded do an ajax call to a method that determines total row count of the query (what happens if the user pages during that time?) and then update the faked/estimated total row count.
However I have no clue how to do an estimate. I tried count(*) * 1000 with SAMPLE (0.1) but for whatever reason that actually takes longer than the full count query. Also just returning a fake/random value seems a bit hacky too. It would need to be bigger than 1 page size so that the "Next" button is enabled.
Other ideas?
One way to do it is as I said in the comments, to use a 'countless' approach. Modify the client side script in such a way that the Next button is always enabled and fetch the rows until there are none, then disable the Next button. You can always add a notification message to say that there are no more rows so it will be more user friendly.
Considering that you are expecting a significant amount of records, I doubt that the user will paginate through all the results.
Another way is to schedule a cron job that will do the counting of the records in the background and store that result in a table called totals. The running intervals of the job should be set up based on the frequency of the inserts / deletetions.
Then in the frontend, just use the count previously stored in totals. It should make a decent aproximation of the amount.
Depends on your DB engine.
In mysql, solution looks like this :
mysql> SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS * FROM tbl_name
-> WHERE id > 100 LIMIT 10;
mysql> SELECT FOUND_ROWS();
Basically, you add another attribute on your select (SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS) which tells mysql to count the rows as if limit clause was not present, while executing the query, while FOUND_ROWS actually retrieves that number.
For oracle, see this article :
How can I perform this query in oracle
Other DBMS might have something similar, but I don't know.
I'm sorry, I am a newbie in PHP. Now I want to learn how to write a pagination effect in PHP. I know there are many tutorials for this on the net. I searched it and have a reference to them. When I try it by myself and don't have a reference to other resources, though, I still don't know how to write a pagination effect with PHP.
Now, I want to know what's the basic and important thing of writing a pagination in PHP. If anyone could give me more details, thank you.
For this example, I will use MySQL because it's a popular database to use with PHP. The general principle applies to other databases, but the precise way you use SQL to achieve the results is different.
The essence of pagination is that you have a number records, say 105, and you only want to display a smaller, more manageable number of records at a time, say 10 of them. In order to do this, you need to know how to find out the total number of records, and you need to know how to select just a subset of the records.
First, find out how many records you have. For this, you use COUNT(*) to count the records in the table. If your table is called Users:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Users;
Since we said there are 105 records in the table, this will return the result 105. We said each page has 10 records, so figure out how many pages there are in total: 105 / 10 = 10.5; round up to 11 because the extra records after page 10 need their own page. So, there are 11 pages in total. Your web page will display controls that enable the user to select a page from 1 to 11.
Instead of fetching all the records, you will only fetch one page at a time. In MySQL you generally do this using the LIMIT keyword; this allows you to choose a range of records. LIMIT syntax works like this: LIMIT $SKIP, $COUNT, where $SKIP is the number of records in the result set to skip, and $COUNT is the number to return. (Actually, you will get up to $COUNT records, in case fewer are available.)
The user has requested page 6. This means that I need to skip 5 pages before the results I want to show. With pages of 10 records each, this means I will skip 5 * 10 records, i.e. 50 records. In other words, $SKIP = ($PAGE_NUMBER - 1) * $PAGE_SIZE. You query would look like this:
SELECT User_ID, UserName, City, State from Users LIMIT 50, 10;
This gives you records 51-60 of the table.
See the documentation to learn more about how LIMIT works:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/select.html
Now you have a single page of records. However, the numbering of the records is dependent on their ordering. The query above will give you unpredictable results because the ordering is undefined. (A database can return records in any order it chooses unless you command it to use a certain ordering.) Thus, to do pagination, you need to define the order of the records. Use ORDER BY to define the ordering:
SELECT User_ID, UserName, City, State from Users ORDER BY UserName LIMIT 50, 10;
This allows you to show different pages of results, and always know that when you show page 6, it contains the records that come after the ones on page 5 and before the ones on page 7.
(If your records don't have any natural ordering, you will have to define an arbitrary one to make this work correctly.)
I have avoided mentioning PHP at all in this answer because I don't think it's necessary to do so to explain pagination. Pagination is entirely a matter of handling data. If you understand this, I think you can go read the tutorials and they will make sense to you and then you can figure how to write the PHP to do this.
Get page number
Know how many items to display on each page.
Using mysql command "LIMIT", get the offset and select how many rows you want.
Want to use a class? http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-paginate-data-with-php/
Or just a plain script to modify? http://pastebin.com/J8nTk1q5
If you are new to PHP, then you need to learn more PHP or risk future confusion.
This is a problem with a ordering search results on my website,
When a search is made, random results appear on the content page, this page includes pagination too. I user following as my SQL query.
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,10;
so my questions are
I need to make sure that everytime user visits the next page, results they already seen not to appear again (exclude them in the next query, in a memory efficient way but still order by rand() )
everytime the visitor goes to the 1st page there is a different sets of results, Is it possible to use pagination with this, or will the ordering always be random.
I can use seed in the MYSQL, however i am not sure how to use that practically ..
Use RAND(SEED). Quoting docs: "If a constant integer argument N is specified, it is used as the seed value." (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mathematical-functions.html#function_rand).
In the example above the result order is rand, but it is always the same. You can just change the seed to get a new order.
SELECT * FROM your_table ORDER BY RAND(351);
You can change the seed every time the user hits the first results page and store it in the user session.
Random ordering in MySQL is as sticky a problem as they come. In the past, I've usually chosen to go around the problem whenever possible. Typically, a user won't ever come back to a set of pages like this more than once or twice. So this gives you the opportunity to avoid all of the various disgusting implementations of random order in favor of a couple simple, but not quite 100% random solutions.
Solution 1
Pick from a number of existing columns that already indexed for being sorted on. This can include created on, modified timestamps, or any other column you may sort by. When a user first comes to the site, have these handy in an array, pick one at random, and then randomly pick ASC or DESC.
In your case, every time a user comes back to page 1, pick something new, store it in session. Every subsequent page, you can use that sort to generate a consistent set of paging.
Solution 2
You could have an additional column that stores a random number for sorting. It should be indexed, obviously. Periodically, run the following query;
UPDATE table SET rand_col = RAND();
This may not work for your specs, as you seem to require every user to see something different every time they hit page 1.
First you should stop using the ORDER BY RAND syntax. This will bad for performance in large set of rows.
You need to manually determine the LIMIT constraints. If you still want to use the random results and you don't want users to see the same results on next page the only way is to save all the result for this search session in database and manipulate this information when user navigate to next page.
The next thing in web design you should understand - using any random data blocks on your site is very, very, very bad for users visual perception.
You have several problems to deal with! I recommend that you go step by step.
First issue: results they already seen not to appear again
Every item returned, store it in one array. (assuming the index id on the example)
When the user goes to the next page, pass to the query the NOT IN:
MySQL Query
SELECT * FROM table WHERE id NOT IN (1, 14, 25, 645) ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,10;
What this does is to match all id that are not 1, 14, 25 or 645.
As far as the performance issue goes: in a memory efficient way
SELECT RAND( )
FROM table
WHERE id NOT
IN ( 1, 14, 25, 645 )
LIMIT 0 , 10
Showing rows 0 - 9 (10 total, Query took 0.0004 sec)
AND
SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE id NOT
IN ( 1, 14, 25, 645 )
ORDER BY RAND( )
LIMIT 0 , 10
Showing rows 0 - 9 (10 total, Query took 0.0609 sec)
So, don't use ORDER BY RAND(), preferably use SELECT RAND().
I would have your PHP generate your random record numbers or rows to retrieve, pass those to your query, and save a cookie on the user's client indicating what records they've already seen.
There's no reason for that user specific data to live on the server (unless you're tracking it, but it's random anyway so who cares).
The combination of
random ordering
pagination
HTTP (stateless)
is as ugly as it comes: 1. and 2. together need some sort of "persistent randomness", while 3. makes this harder to achieve. On top of this 1. is not a job a RDBMS is optimized to do.
My suggestion depends on how big your dataset is:
Few rows (ca. <1K):
select all PK values in first query (first page)
shuffle these in PHP
store shuffled list in session
for each page call select the data according to the stored PKs
Many rows (10K+):
This assumes, you have an AUTO_INCREMENT unique key called ID with a manageable number of holes. Use a amintenace script if needed (high delete ratio)
Use a shuffling function that is parameterized with e.g. the session ID to create a function rand_id(continuous_id)
If you need e.g. the records 100,000 to 100,009 calculate $a=array(rand_id(100,000), rand_id(100,001), ... rand_id(100,009));
$a=implode(',',$a);
$sql="SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE ID IN($a) ORDER BY FIELD(ID,$a)";
To take care of the holes in your ID select a few records too many (and throw away the exess), looping on too few records selected.