Is it bad to put a MySQL query in a PHP loop?

Question

I often have large arrays, or large amounts of dynamic data in PHP that I need to run MySQL queries to handle.

Is there a better way to run many processes like INSERT or

Answer 1

I was inspired by jerebear's answer to build something like his second option for one of my current projects. Because of the shear volume of records I couldn't save and do all the data at once. So I built this to do imports. You add your data, and then call a method when each record is done. After a certain, configurable, number of records the data in memory will be saved with a mass insert like jerebear's second option.

// CREATE TABLE example ( Id INT, Field1 INT, Field2 INT, Field3 INT);
$import=new DataImport($dbh, 'example', 'Id, Field1, Field2, Field3');
foreach ($whatever as $row) {
  // add data in the order of your column definition
  $import->addValue($Id);
  $import->addValue($Field1);
  $import->addValue($Field2);
  $import->addValue($Field3);
  $import->nextRow();
}
$import->lastRow();