delivering seldom updated data from a database

godzooky

i am writing an app which provides data to other websites. the data is stored in a database and only changes one or twice a week, but will be viewed many many times. i want to store the formatted data outside the database when it is updated, so clients aren't hitting the database thousands of times. when the request comes in, i need to verify that they are a current customer and then deliver the data. what is the best way to accomplish this? is it possible to store the info in a class and have the class globally available?

devinemke

if you need to verify that they are a current customer then you will need some sort of authorization routine. i assume you store client data in the database. users would need to enter username/password via form. once authenticated you can spit out the the data. when you say "deliver" the data, does that mean that it can be simply printed to the browser or does it need to be downloaded as a file? if it only needs to be displayed, then pull it out of the database and [man]echo[/man] it to the browser. if it needs to be downloaded then look at the [man]header[/man] function.

godzooky

yes, but that will always pull the data from the database. seems a little foolish to always hit the database when the data is only updated once or twice a week.

devinemke

well, you are either hitting the database or the filesystem, your choice. be advised that if you want to store this data in files then you will have to store the files outside of the doc_root or behind some sort of the server level password protection (htaccess).

mtmosier

Note that I'm far from an expert on the subject, but the in-memory cache in mysql 4.0 seems to work rather well, and might actually be faster then a file caching mechanism. That said, if you're going to do file caching you might want to have a look at PEAR::Cache_Lite.

Roger_Ramjet

This is an ideal situation to maximise the benefits of query cacheing . Like nost modern RDBMS, mysql will cache queries and their results. If the query does not change and the data tables do not change then instead of running the same query again and again, it store and returns the results. This will happen untill either the sql statement chnages or an underlying table changes. This behaviour is transparent and most people don't even realise that is what is happening.