George,
Suggestions interspersed below Miles At 12:53 PM 1/7/2002 +0000, George Pitcher wrote: >Hi all, > >In trying to learn PHP (and MySQL), I am attempting to replicate a >database-web solution built previously using Filemaker Pro and Lasso (on >NT). I am currently working with PHP/MySQL on NT and will be moving this to >Linux before the end of January. > >Filemaker is able to perform calculations internally and therefore I guess I >will need to write functions to mimic this externally. Am I right here? MySQL doesn't have stored procedures, if that's what you mean. If they are really important you might want to consider PostgreSQL. Double-check the MySQL docs, and a newer version might have this. >One of the features of the FMPro solution is that when a user is looking at >a list of resources (in fact, university course packs) each row will display >the number of associated records from the 'books' database. Now which is the >best method to do this (speed/efficiency)? I have tried performing a >row-level query on the related db but its very slow and times out before the >second row can be displayed. Alternately, I could set the main db to >increase/decrease a number field when adding or deleting books from the >list. Which is recommended? Don't do the second. You're creating a maintenance headache. I'm no SQL wizard. Are you fetching information from a courses table, and displaying the number of associated books for each course to get results like this, w/o formatting ... "The Athenian Galley" U. Stroke 2 "Grecian Roots and Folk Clothing" C. Me. Bare 4 where the number at the end is the number of books for the course? select course_name, instructor_name, count(books) from courses, books where books.course_id = courses.course_id and (whatever other criteria you are using to select the course) But something tells me that won't work and I'm no SQL wizard. Something tells me that we're venturing into GROUP BY or HAVING territory. >Dates >I played around with my learning site over the holidays and found that I was >not able to easily handle dates between the format required by users >(dd/mm/yyyy) and that used by MySQL (yyyy-mm-dd) and therefore I wrote >functions to parse the data both ways. All the example I could find on Dates >used 'today' as the example. I want to be able to play around with stored >dates. Is my function method the correct way or is there another way? Yes - but why can't we convert the world to that oh-so-simple date format of year,month,day which sorts and indexes so beautifully and is completely unambiguous. Cheers - Miles Thompson >MTIA > >George in Edinburgh -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
