On Mar 13, 2013, at 10:35 AM, Kevin Peterson wrote:
> In my database design, I tend to store some variable that is meant to be acting as a ROLE or TYPE as SMALLINT. For example :
>
> CREATE TABLE `house` (
> `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
> `type` smallint(11) NOT NULL,
> )
>
>
> And in php, I do
>
> define('HOUSE_SMALL_TYPE', '0');
> define('HOUSE_MEDIUM_TYPE', '1');
>
> So in php, in SELECT queries I do :
>
> $this->db->query("SELECT * FROM house
> WHERE type=?;", HOUSE_SMALL_TYPE);
>
> My questions are :
> 1. In the php part, is there is a better way to do this ?
> 2. In the mysql itself, does mysql also has global define functionality (like the define in php) ? I also want to do kind of SELECT * FROM house WHERE type = HOUSE_SMALL_TYPE in mysql query.
>
Question 1:
I see no possible improvements, you could however use an array with values instead of constants, but that's rather a personal choice as I don't like constants that much, unless you are on your own namespace.
My example implementation:
$houseTypes = array(
'house_small_type' => 0,
'house_medium_type' => 1,
etc.
);
Question 2:
You could use ENUM data type, but it has quite a few disadvantages:
1- Translation could be tricky to implement
2- DDL shouldn't be used for data!
3- Updating or deleting values can leave your old records in an inconsistent state
You can also use SET to set variables, I've never used them but I think they could work in your case:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/user-variables.html
Greetings.
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