I'm creating a user registration form and when I get to confirming the user's email by emailing them, I need some sort of unique string to confirm against.
Instead of generating one in PHP and inserting it into the database, I wanted to try and add a column to my table that would hold a unique value that I could use whenever I needed to confirm something.
What I want to do is set the value to an MD5 of the current timestamp. I tried just doing SELECT MD5(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) in phpMyAdmin just to see if it would let me and it did so I thought I'd add that to an update condition but it doesn't seem to be letting me.
ALTER TABLE users ADD confirmation VARCHAR(40) DEFAULT NULL ON UPDATE MD5(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP);
The above is what I've tried. I get an error and I don't know how else to do it.
Is there anyway I can do this or something similar? Side question, does the ON UPDATE trigger on a row that just got inserted?
The syntax you are trying to use doesn't exist. It looks like you are thinking of ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP but that is a rather specific command, as per https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/timestamp-initialization.html
Use of DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is
specific to TIMESTAMP.
So the ON UPDATE clause only works with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and only on fields of type TIMESTAMP.
If you want to use the MD5 of the current timestamp either set a trigger, or just manually set the value (e.g. UPDATE users SET confirmation=MD5(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()) WHERE user_id=123).
Bare in mind that the MD5 of the current timestamp is something that could be quite easily guessed / brute forced, so don't rely on it for security.
Use a universal unique identifier for this purpose. It's a 128-bit unique number; it's designed for this kind of thing.
It has a string representation that fits in 36 bytes.
aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee
You can generate these things in most programming languages. In MySQL you use the UUID() function to get one. Every time you call UUID(), you're guaranteed to get a new value.
Add a CHAR(36) column to your database, or just use your VARCHAR(40) column.
You can't use data definition language (ALTER TABLE) to declare ON UPDATE except for a native timestamp. You'll need application code to set your UUID values, just like you do for MD5(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP).
Related
I am developing a web application, where my database is updated through the application Front End.
However, sometimes, due to some errors/ support, I do update my database from queries.
Like, for Last Modified Time column, the timestamp is automatically updated using the, 'ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP', so I have accurate information regarding time of update.
Similarly, is there a way, I can change a column which stores Last Modified By (username) of the user, using the 'ON UPDATE' or anything similar on the VARCHAR field, so that, whenever it is updated from the BackEnd, the Last Modified By column is automatically updated as 'SYSTEM'.
Now the database has correct time of update, but Last Modified By column, stores the username of the user who actually last updated it from the Front End and not something that says it was modified through a query, which is causing a bit of confusion.
Hence, doing this will help me avoid confusion that the Entry was modified from the backend and not the application.
As I read in many places, the ON UPDATE was only used on TimeStamps and did not find anything similar to UPDATE Varchar fields.
Thanks for the help!
I have a users table in my mysql database and there I record the time user signed up by having a column timeOfUserSignup (or something like that) of the type TIMESTAMP and default is set to CURRENT_TIME.
But what will happen if I update that user's info. Will that column value change to the time when the update occurred?
No, it will not be changed on updates.
A default value will only be generated if you don't pass any value on table insertion. If you need to change a value on updates too, then you can use an additional trigger for that.
I have a database intensive application that needs to run every couple hours. Is there a way to detect whether a given table has changed since the last time this application ran?
The most efficient way to detect changes is this.
CHECKSUM TABLE tableName
A couple of questions:
Which OS are you working on?
Which storage engine are you using?
The command [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/show-table-status.html](SHOW TABLE STATUS) can display some info depending on storage engine though.
It also depends on how large is the interval between runs of your intensive operation.
The most precise way I believe is with the use of triggers (AFTER INSERT/UPDATE) as #Neuticle mentioned, and just store the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP next to the table name.
CREATE TABLE table_versions(
table_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
version TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
);
CREATE TRIGGER table_1_version_insert AFTER INSERT
ON table_1
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
REPLACE INTO table_versions VALUES('table_1', CURRENT_TIMESTAMP);
END
Could you set a trigger on the tables you want to track to add to a log table on insert? If that would work you only have to read the log tables on each run.
Use timestamp. Depending upon your needs you can set it to update on new rows, or just changes to existing rows. Go here to see a reference:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/timestamp-initialization.html
A common way to detect changes to a table between runs is with a query like this:
SELECT COUNT(*),MAX(t) FROM table;
But for this to work, a few assumptions must be true about your table:
The t column has a default value of NOW()
There is a trigger that runs on UPDATE and always sets the t column to NOW().
Any normal changes made to the table will then cause the output of the above query to change:
There are a few race conditions that can make this sort of check not work in some instances.
Have used CHECKSUM TABLE tablename and that works just splendid.
Am calling it from an AJAX request to check for table updates. If changes are found a screen refresh is performed.
For database "myMVC" and table "detail" it returns one row with fields "table" and "Checksum" set to "mymvc.detail" and "521719307" respectively.
Is there any way, in MySQL, to dynamically generate a field value? For example a field that stamps the exact date and time that a row was inserted.
You could just get the interface to do it (i.e. PHP) but in a case where you have more than one handler it would be safer if I could get MySQL to do it independently.
The MySQL TIMESTAMP data type has a special default called CURRENT_TIMESTAMP that does this.
Read all about it:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/timestamp.html
EDIT:
For the more generic case, use a trigger. You can set the value on an insert using a BEFORE INSERT triggers, and likewise you can set the value on updates using a separate BEFORE UPDATE trigger:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/create-trigger.html
With the query below, I am trying to overwrite the 10th field in a MySQL table called "login" with the value NEW_VALUE. It's not working. Is the code below the correct method for overwriting existing data in a MySQL table?
Thanks in advance,
John
INSERT INTO login VALUES (NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 'NEW_VALUE', NULL, NULL, NULL)
Just as an addition if anyone is still looking for an actual overwrite and not just an update. If you want to OVERWRITE always, (not update, just overwrite) you can use REPLACE instead of INSERT.
REPLACE works exactly like INSERT, except that if an old row in the table has the same value as a new row for a PRIMARY KEY or a UNIQUE index, the old row is deleted before the new row is inserted. See Section 13.2.5, “INSERT Syntax”
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/replace.html
No your code is not correct. You are adding a new row to your table not updating existing values. To update existing values, you want to use an update statement:
Upate a specific record
mysql_query("Update login SET nameOfYourColumn = '$cleanURL' WHERE primaryKey = idOfRowToUpdate")
To update the entire table
mysql_query("Update login SET nameOfYourColumn = '$cleanURL'")
If I've understood your question then the answer is "no". This isn't a mysql specific issue either, it's a generic SQL question. I'd strongly recommend going through an SQL tutorial, the best one I know if is here:
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
To answer your question, you should be able to do:
mysql_query("UPDATE login SET foo = '$cleanurl'");
where "foo" is the name of the tenth field.
A few other comments though:
Firstly, don't rely on the position of your fields, always explicitly list the field names. For example, it's better to go
INSERT INTO login (id, name) VALUES (1, 'Fred')
instead of
INSERT INTO login VALUES (1, 'Fred')
Point 2: You have directly embedded the value of $cleanurl into your query. Of course, you have to learn one thing at a time but be aware that this is very dangerous. If $cleanurl contains something like "'); DROP TABLE login;" then you might be in trouble. This is called SQL injection and is the source of constant security problems. Without going into too much detail, you should learn how to use prepared statements.
Point 3: PHP comes with a library called PDO which supports prepared statements. It also provides a common API for interacting with your database so if you find that you need to move from Mysql to another DBMS, PDO will abstract away most of the differences. By using the mysql_query function you lock yourself into using mysql.
You don't have to address all of these issues simultaneously but don't forget about them either, once you get familiar with PHP and SQL come back to the points about PDO and prepared statements.
First off: INSERT adds a new record to a table, UPDATE updates (overwrites) one or more existing records.
Second: UPDATE needs to know the name of the column to update, and which rows to update
UPDATE <tableName>
SET <columnName> = '$cleanurl'
WHERE <some condition to identify which record should be updated>
Thirdly: it's probably worth your while reading a few basic tutorials on MySQL/SQL