Mysql VIEWS vs. PHP query

Question

I am working on a web application which involves create list of Restaurants in various lists like \"Joe\'s must visit places\". Now for each Restaurant and list, I have display

Answer 1

My complete answer would depend upon several things (from your application's perspective):

• do you plan to allow users to create and share such lists?
• can users create lists of any kind, or just by plugging values into existing query templates?

Assuming you have a couple of pre-defined lists to display:

Use of views offers a couple of advantages:

• your code will be cleaner
• the query to generate the views will not have to be parsed each time by mysql.

I'm not sure about this: I don't think mysql caches views as Tomasz suggests - I don't think views contain "already preparted data".

One disadvantage is that the logic involved in creating the list goes into the database instead of living in your PHP code - something I'm very averse to. In my world databases are for data, and code is for logic.

Cheers