Question

I’m looking for a way to merge MySQL and XML data both together, so I can order them then by timestamp. The ideal situation would be something like:

SELECT timestamp, title
FROM news
UNION ALL
SELECT timestamp, title 
FROM xmlsource('local.xml')
ORDER BY timestamp DESC

Is something like this possible? Or is their any other way to merge both data sources and sorting them? Thank you for any pointers in the right direction.

Answer 1

I don’t know how efficient will this be, but you can test that yourself. Here it is:

<?php
$sql = 'SELECT timestamp, title FROM news ORDER BY timestamp DESC';
$run = mysql_query( $sql, $link );

$result = array();
if( $run && mysql_num_rows( $run ) ) {
    while( ( $fetch = mysql_fetch_assoc( $run ) ) !== false ) {
        $time = $fetch[ 'timestamp' ];
        $title = htmlspecialchars( $fetch[ 'title' ], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8' );

        $result[ $time ][] = $title;
        // this is an array, in case multiple title have same timestamp.
    }
}

$xml = simplexml_load_file( 'local.xml' );
$xpath = $xml->xpath( '//story' );

foreach( $xpath as $story ) {
    $time = $story->time;
    $title = (string) $story->headline;

    $result[ $time ][] = $title; // append this to the results array.
}

// sort by timestamp ascending
arsort( $result );
?>

Hope it helps.