"Weird" question? from newbie

[dogdog]

I have some experience working with Perl and flatfiles, but now I'm trying to learn PHP and MySQL.
All the articles on this site and posts in this discussion board have been great help (try the search function).

One "silly" Yes/No question?

Is it really so that for every link I click like when I read messages in this discussion forum the system:

1. Find host
2. login with username and password
3. Check login info
4. Find MySQL database
5. do something
6. close db

Thanks

[sepodati]

Yes.

The "do something" would include sending queries to the database, however many there are....

---John Holmes...

[dogdog]

Thanks, it just sounds so weird that MySQL is that fast. Now I don't have to worry about "overloading" DB using table sessions instead of cookies.

Thanks

[sepodati]

Well, I wouldn't say you don't have to worry about it. Doing all of that does add some overhead to your page, but you need to weigh that against the benifits of a dynamic page. It's always a matter of weighing your options for the given task...

---John Holmes...

[dogdog]

Ok, I need to list out all users logged in, so I would need some kind of session/data file. I guess it wouldn't be any better writing flatfiles like I do today.

[sepodati]

I would try both options and see which is faster. You can have a column in your database that you set when the user logs in. Then, to get all users logged in, you just
SELECT * FROM your_table WHERE logged_in=true
or something like that.

Both are rather simple. How are you storing your user and password information now? You can store all of that in the database, along with the logged in column and any other information, time of last login, nicknames, etc...It depends on what you want to do...

---John Holmes...

[dogdog]

SELECT * FROM your_table WHERE logged_in=true

Yes, that was the plan. I was just afraid that it might overload the databade since I have to make a script that checks if the user did any action last xxx seconds. Some "forget" to log out ;-)

How are you storing your user and password information now?

I don't use MySQL right now. I'm using a flatfile.

My plans for MySQL tables:

accounts
profiles
sessions

I want to have a "small" session table since this needs to be updated all the time.
Did user do something? update session (time) + check all times in the table and delete if time > xxx seconds.

I'm looking forward to start with this.

[sepodati]

Sounds like a plan... 🙂

---John Holmes...