HTML Formulation: MySQL or PHP?

Question

I'm working on a MySQL/php project, and I came across the situation where I was getting the results of a query from MySQL and dumping them into a HTML table. Now I am wrapping the cells of a particular column in the table in some anchor tags, and I was just wondering was it better or more efficient to do the wrapping in php or in the MySQL Query itself, e.g.:

...
$row_results_from_query['user'] = '<a href="?user=' . $row_results_from_query['user'] . '">' . $row_results_from_query['user'] . '</a>';
...

OR use the query

SELECT ..., CONCAT("<a href='?user=", Users.user, "'>", Users.user, "</a>") FROM ...

I figured that the php way was faster, however I found some articles which suggested that for some things MySQL is faster.

What is best practice? Why?

Or, is it better to create a stored procedure in MySQL instead?

As long you can read your SQL-Query afterwards everything is fine... :-) — devOp
– devOp, Commented Aug 21, 2012 at 9:38

Hassan Khodadadeh · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-21 09:43:51Z

3

"is it better to create a stored procedure in MySQL instead?" No, as this is typical use case for templates (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller). PHP provides a lot more options to parse templates, than MySQL does. Just try to keep in mind any possible future changes, e.g. switching the URL-format from ?user=XXX to ?uid=XXX, or something similar. In MySQL you need to remove an re-create the stored procedure or you need to work on the queries each time, which is error-prone. If you use some kind of a template for such a task, you just need to edit that.

edited Aug 21, 2012 at 9:43

Hassan Khodadadeh

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answered Aug 21, 2012 at 9:42

feeela

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