Question

I’ve done some googling but can’t really get much relevant information. I’m trying to set a date/time for certain rows to be deleted depending on activity. If active, the time would be bumped to a later time unless activated once again.. Otherwise it will be deleted. I’ve managed to sort the rows when activated (inserted/updated) in activity.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Firstly do not put this update/delete in a trigger if you have millions of rows that needs to be deleted you are going to see a huge performance hit on inserts/updates. It is not the best place for it. You can create either a cron job as Filype suggested. Or if you want to keep it all in MySQL use the MySQL Event scheduler.

Go to this page to read more about scheduling events in MySQL:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/events.html

MySQL Event allows you to schedule things on MySQL on a regular basis.

The code would look something like

 CREATE EVENT myevent
 ON SCHEDULE AT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP + INTERVAL 1 HOUR
 DO
  DELETE FROM MyTable Where Expired< NOW();