making connection

elemelas

Quick question guys - is it better to make a new mysql connection every time you need it in the script (let's say you have few selects in different places on the page) or just simply open a connection at the beggining of the page and end it at the end ?

Is there any security or performance need to close it after each query, or will it be quicker and not risky to leave it open through the whole script ?

If it matters I want to make a new connection with MySQL through PDO.

laserlight

Ideally, I would say that you should create the database connection just before your first SQL statement is executed, and then close it just after your last SQL statement is executed.

bradgrafelman

elemelas wrote:
is it better to make a new mysql connection every time you need it in the script

Definitely not - you're just multiplying the connection/disconnection overhead.

elemelas wrote:
will it be quicker and not risky to leave it open through the whole script ?

Don't know what you mean by "not risky" (are you afraid of PHP getting hungry and gobbling up your database?), but considering that your PHP script probably takes only milliseconds to execute (if not, why??) I would say it's much "quicker" to simply open/close the connection once (in a method much like what laserlight suggested above).

elemelas

Good to hear guys 😉 that's how I'm doing since I've learnt PHP/MySQL, but I was wondering maybe it's wrong. But apparently it's not. Thanks for that 😉

Second question - does anybody know why function NOW() doesn't work when I'm using it in my querys in PDO ? It's working without PDO and all my PDO querys are working fine, but when I'm trying to:

$query = $conn->prepare('SELECT * FROM profiles WHERE date>NOW()');

doesn't work! doesn't give me any errors, just doesn't output any data. but as I said exactly the same statement works fine with plain mysql, what's going on ? is it a bug or something ? I'm using PHP 5.3.0 ...