copying table entries to archive

[tonyw]

hi,

ok, i have a forum with topic entries, in the usual manner. I want to clip off entries beyond a certain date to an equivelent archive table which is the same in every way. My thinking being that the active table will operate more quickly if older stuff is sitting in its own archive.

What's the best way to copy the table entries across? Is it simply a case of manually reading the entries to the archived and INSERTing them in the archive table? I did wonder if there was a special mysql command to duplicate tables...?

thanks
tony

[freedomics]

Assumming you are using MySQL and your tables are identical in schema...

INSERT INTO archive_table SELECT
field1,
field2,
field3
FROM
active_table
WHERE
field2 <= '2003-03-03'

Obviously field1, field2, etc. would be replaced by your column names. I don't think you can use an * in the SELECT to capture all fields, but you could try.

[tonyw]

thanks freedomics,

i did try the * after doing some reading but, you're quite right, you can't do it so have to specify the fields which is a shame. I thought they might have implemented a super fast version where 2 tables were the same format...

thanks again
tony