Question

I have a primary key in my mysql table which is comprised of three columns.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `bb_bulletin` (
  `OfficeCode` int(5) NOT NULL,
  `IssuerId` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `BulletinDtm` datetime NOT NULL,
  `CategoryCode` varchar(4) NOT NULL,
  `Title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `Content` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`OfficeCode`,`IssuerId`,`BulletinDtm`),
  UNIQUE KEY `U_IssuerId` (`IssuerId`,`OfficeCode`,`BulletinDtm`),
  UNIQUE KEY `U_CategoryCode` (`CategoryCode`,`OfficeCode`,`IssuerId`,`BulletinDtm`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Is there a shorthand method to select a record for a given value of the primary key.

I tried.

SELECT * FROM `bb_bulletin` WHERE PRIMARY = '20001-1-2011-01-07 14:04:40'

Instead of the long hand method of doing,

SELECT * From bb_bulletin WHERE OfficeCode = 20001 AND IssuerId = 1 AND BulletinDtm = 2011-01-07 14:04:40

What is the standard when dealing php and composite keys in your table.
Note: I don’t want to add autoincrementing keys to my tables in order to solve this. If it is not possible then I will just pass the three constraints in my url.

Answer 1

I see two parts to your question. The first part is about referencing a composite value. I’m not sure whether MySQL support this, but it would be the SQL standard way of doing this:

SELECT * FROM bb_bulletin WHERE (OfficeCode, IssuerId, BulletinDtm) = (20001, 1, '2011-01-07 14:04:40');

The other part is referring to the primary key columns using an abbreviated syntax. I don’t know of any such possibility.