General session/style question

[mohamed42]

I have a database that consists of a table that has vital statistics about different people. I use information from that table often in my PHP scripts. I have two options for getting access to that data- one of them is to session_register() every variable I need so that I have access to them at all times, the other is to only session_register the person_id (primary key) and then grab everything else out of the database when it's needed. My question is this- what's considered better coding practice? I make sure to always unregister variables and destroy sessions (assuming that the user clicks the "log out" button, that is.)

(This is cool, I've gone from cracking open my first ever book on PHP and MySQL to asking pseudo-philosophical coding questions and writing complete scripts out of memory in a week flat. I wish dating was this easy.)

[[deleted]]

It depends.

Generally speaking a database is kept up-to-date, so putting the data you read from the database into sessions makes them 'out-of-date' the next time you read them. (because they may have changed in the database) So it's better to read the data from the datbaase directly.

On the other hand, if the data doesn't change very often, or the changes don't have to be visible in your application immediately, then storing the data in sessions saves you a lot of queries, which may speed up your application.

Personally I try to use the database as much as possible to avoid gettin out-of-date data. This is especially important in a busy multi-user environment.