Question

I’m new to PHP/MySQL. For those who populate your db with sample data before launching, how do you do it while staying true to the column’s data type? For example, here’s what my table looks like:

+-------------+------------------+
| Field       | Type             |
+-------------+------------------+
| speaker_id  | int(10) unsigned |
| name        | char(200)        |
| writeup     | text             |
| is_employee | tinyint(1)       |
+-------------+------------------+

All values will be inserted using a bulk insert by adding to the sql string INSERT INTO table_name VALUES (...), (...), etc. to keep the db resource use low.

Answer 1

You can load contents into your DB using a txt, CSV or Excel file

Command is

LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/test.csv' INTO TABLE test(field1,field2,field3,...)
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';