[RESOLVED] what's the best way of checking if a record is more than n hours old ?

[steamPunk]

Hi there

i was wondering what would be the best way of checking if an entry in the db is older than, say, 24 hours

I imagine that i could use date(); to generate a date and time when inserting into the DB - but I would like to be able to delete anything older than the given time limit

what's a sort of standard way of tackling this prob ?

thanks for your help

[quaffapint]

You could just setup an int10 in the db, and use something like...

$time = time();
// Delete any entry older than 20 minutes for maintenance purposes
  $delete_query = 'DELETE FROM '.$db_name.'.'.$db_prefix.'table_name WHERE time<='.($time-(60*20));

...you could also use a timestamp in the db and leave the calculations up to mysql, but either way would work.

[steamPunk]

ok I've just looked up time() in the manual - I wasn't even aware of it's existence !

your solution looks just the ticket

presumably for 24 hours i would do

WHERE time<='.($time-(246020));

thanks for that - it's a big help