Running a Script as a Cron Job

Hello, All

Right! As usual I've had a determined but possibly ham-fisted stab at trying to work out my own problem. This is what I've done (which may explain what I was trying to achieve!)...

Cron runs once a day and executes the following script:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT num, title, etc...);

while( $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)){
$new_array[] = $row;
}

$serializedData = serialize($new_array);
file_put_contents('../path/filename.php', $serializedData);

So the script runs a query and outputs the array to a file which is saved on the server.

In my webpage I have the following code which collects the data and feeds it back into another script:

<?php
  $recoveredData = file_get_contents('../path/filename.php');
  $recoveredArray = unserialize($recoveredData);
?>

<?php foreach($recoveredArray as $recovered): ?>
  <?php echo $recovered['title'] ?>
  etc...
<?php endforeach ?>

It seems to work. The question now is, is this the right way to do it? Are there other, better, more secure ways of achieving the same thing?

Perch

Hey Perch,

This could be a good method to use if the MySQL calls you're making are extremely complex, but if it's fairly straight forward requests you're probably best sticking to getting the data directly from the MySQL database. 

This is because MySQL can cache popular requests to memory so that the data is retrieved quickly, and is designed to handle lots of simultaneous requests. 

I found this stack overflow post that goes over the reasons in more detail:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20269940/php-read-file-vs-mysql-query

Thanks!

Greg