Hi Cliff, Cliff Hirsch wrote on Sunday, October 22, 2006 7:08 AM: > Is serializing/unserializing object/arrays for storage/retrieval in a > MySQL db truly reliable? It would be awfully handy, but the PHP > manual notes list various issues that make me wary.
I would frankly recommend against it. While it's possible if you're careful, there can be a lot of surprises, such as: -- unserialized objects aren't quite what you may expect them to be (ie, the definition of the class either has changed or doesn't exist) -- it's slow -- it doesn't give you any type of normalization - ie, the object's data is relationally useless - and you end up having to do text matching to find anything There are some other options, that may be better: http://us3.php.net/wddx Although it has it's downfalls too. End of the day, I'd try to avoid serializing objects - serializing arrays and scalar types, though not optimized in PHP (ie, slow), is much more reliable. --- Hans Zaunere / President / New York PHP www.nyphp.org / www.nyphp.com _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
