Webhotels and dynamic table creation?

spookztar

Hi,

Just to get any doubts out of the way

It's fairly normal that you are not allowed to create databases through PHP on your average webhotel. But what about creating tables through a PHP script? Isn't that more or less allowed as standard?

Bye,

sid

wtf is a webhotel? do you mean a hosting service?
creating tables is pretty much a necessity if you want to work with php... and yes, i would assume that this is possible via php, or at least some admin tool such as cpanel, plesk, etc.

bradgrafelman

spookztar wrote:
It's fairly normal that you are not allowed to create databases through PHP on your average webhotel. But what about creating tables through a PHP script?

It doesn't matter if you're interfacing with the SQL server via PHP or via the CLI - your user account has specific permissions. If you have the "CREATE TABLE" permission, then you can create tables in your database. Period. You can use any software you prefer to do this, because it all boils down to sending the SQL server a command after logging in with your user account.

MarkR

It is not normal to create tables through PHP.

Typically you would write a script to create the tables, run it once from the MySQL CLI, then the tables would be created and they would remain until you drop them.

Therefore it's unusual for the PHP code to create its own tables - they typically already exist.

Some applications do do so however. They may either have some kind of auto-install feature which enables it to create the tables if they don't already exist. Some applications also create tables dynamically, but I wouldn't recommend this technique for general use - don't use it unless you understand its implications and effects.

Mark

spookztar

sid: Thanx for replying, but you're not really on target on my point.

Yes, I mean a website hostingservice. Around where I live, they're called webhotels.

MarkR: It's not normal? I was afraid it might be the case, I just thought it would be more ease-of-use'ish, if a new user of the application could just run a set-up script from the browser to get the application infrastructure ready, with table, folder and the necessary file creation in place and then remove it afterwards. I just wanted to know, to what extend customers might run into problems with their provider of choice, if I did it this way, as it could cause an extra supportburden unless I provide additional instructions in the accompanying documentation. I would rather get around that.

Thanx for the feedback.

bradgrafelman

As MarkR pointed out, the situation this is commonly used in is auto-install scripts of some sort. If this is what yours is, then I suppose there's nothing wrong with that.

I haven't run into a host who doesn't give you complete control over tables within your own database, but I suppose they are out there. Obviously you would check to see if an error was returned after your CREATE TABLE queries and, if so, alert the user to the fact that permissions are restricting the application from running properly (or something fancy like that).