I am developing a PHP web based data entry tool with MySQL as the database. However the database will undoubtedly change whilst the data entry is going on (there is a lot of it to be done so we have started it so that it runs in parallel to the other development).
I have constructed the SQL queries so that the php can automatically:
Determine what tables are in the database
List tables with a certain prefix so that only ones that data entry should use are listed
However, what I cant figure out (despite checking php, sql and mysql manuals and tutorials) is how to automatically pull tables that are connected by foreign key, so that data entry have a list of items to choose from for the given table. So in short, how do I - using php - determine:
Any foreign keys for the given table
The table name that the foreign key points to
WITHOUT hard-coding any table names into the SQL queries?
A quick way to list your Foreign Key references using the KEY_COLUMN_USAGE view:
SELECT CONCAT( table_name, '.',
column_name, ' -> ',
referenced_table_name, '.',
referenced_column_name ) AS list_of_fks
FROM information_schema.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE
WHERE REFERENCED_TABLE_SCHEMA = (your schema name here)
AND REFERENCED_TABLE_NAME is not null
ORDER BY TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME;
This query does assume that the constraints and all referenced and referencing tables are in the same schema.
For InnoDB tables, using the Comment field of SHOW TABLE STATUS is useful for extracting foreign key information for older versions of MySQL.
I am unaware of any other way than the above 2 methods.
Happy coding!
Related
I am new with PHP development and just wondering if theres a existing function on PHP than duplicate the copy command on phpmyadmin, i know that the query sequence is below, but this is like a long query/code since the table has alot of columns. i mean if phpmyadmin has this feature maybe its calling a build in function?
SELECT * FROM table where id = X
INSERT INTO table (XXX)VALUES(XXX)
Where the information is based from the SELECT query
Note: The id is primary and auto increment.
Here is the copy command on phpmyadmin
i mean if phpmyadmin has this feature maybe its calling a build in function?
There is no built-in functionality in MySQL to duplicate a row other than an INSERT statement of the form: INSERT INTO tableName ( columns-specification ) SELECT columns-specification FROM tableName WHERE primaryKeyColumns = primaryKeyValue.
The problem is you need to know the names of the columns beforehand, you also need to exclude auto_increment columns, as well as primary-key columns, and know how to come up with "smart defaults" for non-auto_increment primary key columns, especially composite keys. You'll also need to consider if any triggers should be executed too - and how to handle any constraints and indexes that may be designed to prevent duplicate values that a "copy" operation might introduce.
You can still do it in PHP, or even pure-MySQL (inside a sproc, using Dynamic SQL) but you'll need to query information_schema to get metadata about your database - which may be more trouble than it's worth.
i am building a auto / generic client admin panel for Mysql Databases , it only takes a connection string and the system Dynamically creates all the The forms for all the tables with validation and Creates ALL CRUD operations for the tables in the database , i finished all that and did it OOP but the last thing to do is get the tables and Fields Relations Dynamically , so how can i implement that ?
Best Regards,
Look at the MySQL SHOW TABLES... and SHOW COLUMNS... statements.
If you're looking for foreign key constraints you can query INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE.
Both gonna help you out:
SELECT * FROM information_schema.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE WHERE table_schema='<database>' AND REFERENCED_COLUMN_NAME IS NOT NULL
Prints you all foreign keys of a specified database.
Can easily be used for any case of working with your foreign keys.
Might also be helpful:
Foreign key constraints missing from SHOW CREATE TABLE output
I have two tables in mysql. When I insert/delete values in the first table I want that the values get duplicated in table 2 to keep them "aligned".
table1:
id - username
1 - test_user
table2:
Same id as table1 and username as table1 (on insert/delete)
I want to keep the data between the tables aligned without doing multiple queries. I've read about triggers not sure if it's the correct road, i am a beninner.
I said two tables but i will need to do this in multiple tables.
You can use Mysql triggers. This way you can auto insert/update/delete datas from second table.
MySql Using Triggers
When you INSERT new records, given that you don't want to do two inserts for some reason, using a trigger to insert into the second table will work. For UPDATE and DELETE you might want to look at the CASCADE option with foreign keys. If all you are doing is keeping the data consistent between tables, that's exactly what cascade is for.
When you create table2 you just add a foreign key like this:
FOREIGN KEY (id, username)
REFERENCES table1(id, username) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE
Then whenever you alter table1 the changes will automatically get pushed through to table2.
Couple prerequisites for this to work:
You have to use a storage engine that supports foreign keys, something like InnoDB and not MyISAM
You need to have an index on (id,username) in table1; the foriegn key needs to match a key in the parent table
You should read the doc page for foreign keys. There are a couple other ways you can tweak them, and you should figure out what works best for your purposes.
You can certainly put triggers on your table1 to make parallel changes to your other tables as your application changes table1.
See here for the documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/trigger-syntax.html
But, you should think over your design. It will take multiple queries to do your inserts and updates; they'll just be done "behind your back" on the server. They'll still take time. Triggers can really slow things down.
Also, triggers are a little bit fragile. If you add a column to a table, you'll have to rework your triggers. Triggers are generally a pain in the neck to keep in a source-control system and a huge pain in the neck to test, so using them will make your application more troublesome to maintain.
Could you think of another approach to handling this need for duplication? Could you, for example, use a view or a join to present the data you need to your application program without actually duplicating tables and the rows in them? If you figure out how to do that you'll be much happier in the long run.
CREATE VIEW table2 AS
SELECT *
FROM table1;
will produce a "fake" table2 with the contents of table1.
Or if you're hoping to view only the test users in a second table, a view can do that for you too, for example:
CREATE VIEW table3 AS
SELECT *
FROM table1
WHERE usertype = 'test_user' ;
If you're using duplicate tables for "backup," that's a bad way to make sure your information is safe. Instead, you need to back up your MySQL server instance.
Formal relational database design principles teach us to duplicating data, but instead use view and joins to structure the data the way applications need to see it.
I would like write a php script that merges several databases, and I would like to be sure of how to go around it before I start anything.
I have 4 databases which have the same structure and almost same data. I want to merge them without any duplicate entry while preserving (or re-linking) the foreign keys.
For example there is a db1.product table which is almost the same as db2.products so I think I would have to use LIKE comparison on name and description columns to be sure that I only insert new rows. But then, when merging the orders table I have to make sure that the productID still indicates the right product.
So I thought of 2 solutions :
Either I use for each table insert into db1.x as select * from db2.x and then make new links and check for duplicate using triggers.
Either I delete duplicate entries and update new foreign keys (after having dropped constraints) and then insert row into the main database.
Just heard of MySQL Data Compare and Toad for mySQL, could they help me to merge tables ?
Could someone indicate to me what should be the right solution ?
sorry for my english and thank you !
First thing is how are you determining whether products are the same? You mentioned LIKE comparison on name and description. You need to establish a rule what says that product is one and the same in your db1, db2 and so on.
However, let's assume that product's name and description are the attributes that define it.
ALTER TABLE products ADD UNIQUE('name', 'description');
Run this on all of your databases.
After you've done that, select one of the databases you wish to import into and run the following query:
INSERT IGNORE INTO db1.products SELECT * FROM db2.products;
Repeat for the remaining databases.
Naturally, this all fails if you can't determine how you're going to compare the products.
Note: never use reserved words for your column names such as word "name".
Firstly, good luck with this - sounds like a tricky job.
Secondly, I wouldn't do this with PHP - I'd write SQL to do the work, assuming this is a one-off migration task and not a recurring task.
As an approach, I would do the following.
Create a database with the schema you want - it sounds like each of your 4 databases have small variations in the schema. Just create the schema for now, don't worry about the data.
Create a "working" database, with the same schema, but with columns for "old" primary keys. For instance:
table ORDER
order_id int primary key auto increment
old_order_id int not null
...other columns...
table ORDER_LINE
order_line_id int primary key auto increment
old_order_line_id int not null
order_id int foreign key
...other columns...
Table by table, Insert into your working database from your first source database. Let the primary keys auto_increment, but put the original primary key into the "old_" column.
For instance:
insert into workingdb.orders
select null, order_id, ....other columns...
from db1.orders
Where you have a foreign key, populate it by finding the record in the old_ column.
For instance:
insert into workingdb.order_line
select null, ol.order_line_id, o.order_id
from db1.order_line ol,
workingdb.order
where ol.order_id = o.old_order_id
Rinse and repeat for the other databases.
Finally, copy the data from your working database into the "proper" database. This is optional - it may help to retain the old IDs for lookups etc.
What is the purpose of the Secondary key? Say I have a table that logs down all the check-ins (similar to Foursquare), with columns id, user_id, location_id, post, time, and there can be millions of rows, many people have stated to use secondary keys to speed up the process.
Why does this work? And should both user_id and location_id be secondary keys?
I'm using mySQL btw...
Edit: There will be a page that lists/calculates all the check-ins for a particular user, and another page that lists all the users who has checked-in to a particular location
mySQL Query
Type 1
SELECT location_id FROM checkin WHERE user_id = 1234
SELECT user_id FROM checkin WHERE location_id = 4321
Type 2
SELECT COUNT(location_id) as num_users FROM checkin
SELECT COUNT(user_id) as num_checkins FROM checkin
The key (also called index) is for speeding up queries. If you want to see all checkins for a given user, you need a key on user_id field. If you want to see all checking for a given location, you need index on location_id field. You can read more at mysql documentation
I want to comment on your question and your examples.
Let me just suggest strongly to you that since you are using MySQL you make sure that your tables are using the innodb engine type for many reasons you can research on your own.
One important feature of InnoDB is that you have referential integrity. What does that mean? In your checkin table, you have a foreign key of user_id which is the primary key of the user table. With referential integrity, MySQL will not let you insert a row with a user_id that doesn't exist in the user table. Using MyISAM, you can. That alone should be enough to make you want to use the innodb engine.
To your question about keys/indexes, essentially when a table is defined and a key is declared for a column or some combination of columns, mysql will create an index.
Indexes are essential for performance as a table grows with the insert of rows.
All relational databases and Document databases depend on an implementation of BTree indexing. What Btree's are very good for, is finding an item (or not) using a predictable number of lookups. So when people talk about the performance of a relational database the essential building block of that is use of btree indexes, which are created via KEY statements or with alter table or create index statements.
To understand why this is, imagine that your user table was simply a text file, with one line per row, perhaps separated by commas. As you add a row, a new line in the text file gets added at the bottom.
Eventually you get to the point that you have 10,000 lines in the file.
Now you want to find out if you entered a line for one particular person with the last name of Smith. How can you find that out?
Without any sort of sortation of the file, or a separate index, you have but one option and that is to start at the first line in the file and scan through every line in the table looking for a match. Even if you found a Smith, that might not be the only 'Smith' in the table, so you have to read the entire file from top to bottom every time you want do do this search.
Obviously as the table grows the performance of searching gets worse and worse.
In relational database parlance, this is known as a "table scan". The database has to start at the first row and scan through reading every row until it gets to the end.
Without indexes, relational databases still work, but they are highly dependent on IO performance.
With a Btree index, the rows you want to find are found in the index first. The indexes have a pointer directly to the data you want, so the table no longer needs to be scanned, but instead the individual data pages required are read. This is how a database can maintain adequate performance even when there are millions or 10's or 100's of millions of rows.
To really start to gain insight into how mysql works, you need to get familiar with EXPLAIN EXTENDED ... and start looking at the explain plans for queries. Simple ones like those you've provided will have simple plans that show you how many rows are being examined to get a result and whether or not they are using one or more indexes.
For your summary queries, indexes are not helpful because you are doing a COUNT(). The table will need to be scanned when you have no other criteria constraining the search.
I did notice what looks like a mistake in your summary queries. Just based on your labels, I would think that these are the right queries to get what you would want given your column alias names.
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT user_id) as num_users FROM checkin
SELECT COUNT(*) as num_checkins FROM checkin
This is yet another reason to use InnoDB, which when properly configured has a data cache (innodb buffer pool) similar to other rdbms's like oracle and sql server. MyISAM doesn't cache data at all, so if you are repeatedly querying the same sorts of queries that might require a lot of IO, MySQL will have to do all that data reading work over and over, whereas with InnoDB, that data could very well be sitting in cache memory and have the result returned without having to go back and read from storage.
Primary vs Secondary
There really is no such concept internally. A Primary key is special because it allows the database to find one single row. Primary keys must be unique, and to reflect that, the associated Btree index is unique, which simply means that it will not allow you to have 2 keys with the same data to exist in the index.
Whether or not an index is unique is an excellent tool that allows you to maintain the consistency of your database in many other cases. Let's say you have an 'employee' table with the SS_Number column to store social security #. It makes sense to have an index on that column if you want the system to support finding an employee by SS number. Without an index, you will tablescan. But you also want to have that index be unique, so that once an employee with a SS# is inserted, there is no way the database will let you enter a duplicate employee with the same SS#.
But to demystify this for you, when you declare keys these indexes are just being created for you and used automagically in most cases, when you define the tables.
It's when you aren't dealing with keys (primary or foreign) as in the example of usernames, first, last & last names, ss#'s etc., that you need to also be aware of how to create an index because you are searching (using where clause criteria) on one or more columns that aren't keys.