Question

In our last episode (How I constructed a cross database query in MySQL) I learned how to construct a cross database query in MySQL. This worked great but when our hero tried to use this newfound knowledge in PHP he found his best friend FAIL waiting for him.

I took a look at mysql_select_db for PHP. This seems to imply that if I want to use MySQL with PHP, I have a couple of choices:

1. Use mysql_select_db but be stuck with only using one db at a time. This is our current setup and putting a database as a namespace identifier doesn’t seem to work (it works fine in the MySQL shell so I know it’s not a problem with our MySQL server setup).

2. Don’t use mysql_select_db. From some of the examples I’ve seen, this seems to mean that I have to specify the db for every query that I make. This makes sense since I haven’t used mysql_select_db to tell PHP what db I want to access. This also makes sad since I don’t want to go through all my code and prepend a db name to every query.

Is there something better than this? Is there a way for me to do a cross db MySQL query in PHP without having to something crazy like (2)?

CLARIFICATION: None of the proposed answers actually let me do a cross db query. Instead, they allow me to access two different DBs separately. I want a solution that allows me to do something like SELECT foreign_db.login.username, firstname, lastname from foreign_db.login, user where ... NOT just make different queries to different DBs. For what it’s worth, (2) doesn’t work for me.

Answer 1

You will need your databases to run on the same host.

If so, you should be able to use mysql_select_db on your favourite/default db and manually specify a foreign database.

$db = mysql_connect($hots, $user, $password);
mysql_select_db('my_most_used_db', $db);

$q = mysql_query("
    SELECT *
    FROM   table_on_default_db a, `another_db`.`table_on_another_db` b
    WHERE  a.id = b.fk_id
");

If your databases run on a different host, you won’t be able to join directly. But you can then make 2 queries.

$db1 = mysql_connect($host1, $user1, $password1);
$db2 = mysql_connect($host2, $user2, $password2);

$q1 = mysql_query("
    SELECT id
    FROM   table
    WHERE  [..your criteria for db1 here..]
", $db1);
$tmp = array();
while($val = mysql_fetch_array($q1))
    $tmp[] = $val['id'];

$q2 = mysql_query("
    SELECT *
    FROM   table2
    WHERE  fk_id in (".implode(', ', $tmp).")
", $db2);