Pulling row from query based on id not rownumber

jamesmu

Basicly my situation is that I want to make a number of lookups based on the id of the row but rather than doing this as seperate sql querys i wondered if it was possible load all the information into the results array and then pull it by id much in the same way you can use mysql_result() to pull the results by row.

I am asuming that this would be a prefered way to ease load on the server if say there was 300 rows in the table and i wanted to reference maybe 20 of them individually.

I hope this makes sense,

Thanks in advanced

laserlight

jamesmu wrote:
I am asuming that this would be a prefered way to ease load on the server if say there was 300 rows in the table and i wanted to reference maybe 20 of them individually.

No, it would be better to just select those rows that you need (possibly with a single query) and retrieve them. Retrieving all of 300 rows just for 20 may be fine, but retrieving all of 300 million rows just for 20 might not be so fine.

jamesmu

Ok, thanks for this advice.

I always assumed that the less sql querys the better, but i guess its less actual data coming from the database so thats better?

laserlight

jamesmu wrote:
I always assumed that the less sql querys the better, but i guess its less actual data coming from the database so thats better?

Yes, reducing the number of SQL statements executed is a good idea, but not at the cost of doing PHP to do the work that the database probably can do better.

In all likelihood you do not need 20 SQL statements (or to execute one SQL statement 20 times with different bindings), but only one.