Question

I need to create multiple tables at once. Im having a hard time figuring out the correct method for accomplishing this. Currently my script looks like this:

  private function buildDB() {
    $sql = <<<MySQL_QUERY
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS headings (
type        VARCHAR(150),
heading     VARCHAR(100),
uniqueid    VARCHAR(100)
)

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS titles (
type        VARCHAR(150),
heading     VARCHAR(100),
uniqueid    VARCHAR(100)
)
MySQL_QUERY;

    return mysql_query($sql);
  }

Obviously, this doesn’t work and no tables are created. Is there a simple way for creating multiple tables at once?

Answer 1

MySQL is getting confused because you’re not delimiting your queries. Add a semicolon after the first CREATE statement:

private function buildDB() {
    $sql = <<<MySQL_QUERY
        CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS headings (
        type        VARCHAR(150),
        heading     VARCHAR(100),
        uniqueid    VARCHAR(100)
        );

        CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS titles (
        type        VARCHAR(150),
        heading     VARCHAR(100),
        uniqueid    VARCHAR(100)
        )
MySQL_QUERY;

    return mysql_query($sql);
}

Also, make sure MySQL_QUERY is at the beginning of the line with no other characters, except maybe a semicolon, as per the Heredoc documentation.

---

Seeing as the above doesn’t appear to work, give this code a try:

private function buildDB() {
    $sql1 = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS headings (
        type        VARCHAR(150),
        heading     VARCHAR(100),
        uniqueid    VARCHAR(100))";

    $sql2 = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS titles (
        type        VARCHAR(150),
        heading     VARCHAR(100),
        uniqueid    VARCHAR(100))";
MySQL_QUERY;

    return mysql_query($sql1) && mysql_query($sql2);
}

You could use mysqli_multi_query() (the MySQL version doesn’t exist), but you’d have to use MySQLi then. The above code returns the logical AND of the two queries, so you still get a 0 returned if one fails.