August 29, 2008Building a Better Board Banner System Part II: Using LAST_INSERT_ID()
In the first post in this series I talked about the design process for my new banner system. I wanted it to be 100% accurate so I eliminated any sort of random number generation process. I also eliminated a SELECT … FOR UPDATE because I was concerned about deadlocks affecting the efficiency of my code. At the end of the post I introduced the MySQL LAST_INSERT_ID() function. Today I will cover it in much more detail.
MySQL offers an interesting function called LAST_INSERT_ID() that – once I figured out the proper syntax – provided exactly what I needed for my accurate and efficient banner system. What does it do? Simply put, it provides a shortcut to return the result of a previous SQL statement without having to worry about intervening updates. Before I explain the function, I want to share a bit of the database design and how the process will eventually work.
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