SQL Query Caching

Articles   Database   SQL  

by Ori Staub | 6 comments | Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Intended Audience

Overview

Prerequisites

Caching SQL Query Results

- Why cache query results?

- Creating an SQL Query

- Deciding when to update the cache

- Caching the results

- Using the Cache

- Putting it all together

Possible Additions

The Script

About the Author

Intended Audience
This tutorial is intended for the PHP programmer interested in caching SQL queries to reduce the

overhead of a database connection and query, and to improve script performance.

Overview
Many sites use a database backend as a data store for the site. Whether the database contains

product information, category structure, articles or a guest book, some of the data is likely to be quite

static and will greatly benefit from a caching system.

Such a system would cache the results of an SQL query into a file stored on the system and hence

improve the response time by avoiding the need to make a database connection, forming the query,

executing it and retrieving the results.

On systems where the database does not reside on the same machine as the web server and requires

a remote connection (TCP or similar), or where large amounts of data are retrieved from the

database, you stand to gain even more in terms of response times and resources used.
Prerequisites
This tutorial will use MySQL as the database. You will need MySQL installed (available from

www.mysql.com) and PHP MySQL extension enabled (it is enabled by default).

You will need to know the basics of the SQL (Structured Query Language) in order to query the

database.
Caching SQL Query Results
Why cache query results?

Caching query results can dramatically improve script execution time and resource requirements.

Caching SQL results also allows you to carry out post processing on the data. This may not be possible

if you use file caching to cache the outputs of the entire script (HTML output caching).

When you execute an SQL query, the typical process undertaken is:
 Connect to the database

 Prepare SQL query

 Send query to database

 Retrieve the results

 Close the database connection

The above is quite resource intensive and can adversely affect the script performance. This can be

further compounded by factors such as amount of data retrieved and location of database server.

Although persistent connections may improve the overhead of connecting to the database, they are

more memory intensive and the overall time saved will be very little if a large amount of data is

retrieved.

Creating an SQL Query

SQL (Structured Query Language) queries are used as an interface to manipulate a database and its

contents. SQL can be used to define and edit the table structure, insert data into the tables, update

and delete information from the tables.

SQL is the language used to communicate with the database and in most PHP database extensions

(MySQL, ODBC, Oracle etc), the extension manages the process of passing the SQL query to the

database.

In this tutorial, only the select statement is used to retrieve data from the database. This data is

cached and later used as the data source.

Deciding when to update the cache

Caching can take a few forms according to the program's needs. The 3 most common approaches are:
 Time triggered caching (expiry timestamp).

 Information change triggered caching (sensing data has changed and updating the cache

accordingly).
 Manual triggered caching (manually letting the system know information is outdated and

forcing a new cache generation).

Your caching requirements may be one or a combination of the mechanisms above. In this tutorial,

the time-triggered approach is discussed. However, a combination of all 3 approaches can be used as

an overall caching policy.

Caching the results

The basics to caching is using the serialize() and unserialize() PHP functions.

The serialize() function can be used to store PHP values without losing their types and structure.

In fact, the PHP session extension uses the serialized representation of the variables in a file to store

the contents of the session variable ($_SESSION).

The unserialize() function reverses the operation and turns the serialized string back into its

original structure and data contents.

In this example, an e-commerce store is used. The store has 2 basic tables, categories and products.

While product information may change daily, categories remain fairly static.

For product display, you can use an output caching script to store the resultant HTML output in a file

to be called up. However, categories may need some post processing. For example, all categories are

displayed and according to the category_id variable that is passed to the script

($_REQUEST['category_id']) you may wish to highlight the current category selected.

The categories table has the following format:

+----------------------+------------------+-----+----------------+
| Field | Type | Key | Extra |
+----------------------+------------------+-----+----------------+
| category_id | int(10) unsigned | PRI | auto_increment |
| category_name | varchar(255) | | |
| category_description | text | | |
+----------------------+------------------+-----+----------------+
In this example, the time limited caching technique is used where the cached SQL output is considered

outdated after a set amount of time. In this particular example, 24 hours are used.

Serialize example:
 Connect to database

 Execute query

 Get all results into an array so you can access them later.

 Serialize array

 Save serialized array to file

$file = 'sql_cache.txt';
$link = mysql_connect('localhost','username','password')
    or die (mysql_error());
mysql_select_db('shop')
    or die (mysql_error());
/* form SQL query */
$query = "SELECT * FROM categories";
$result = mysql_query($query)
    or die (mysql_error());
while ($record = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
    $records[] = $record;
}
$OUTPUT = serialize($records);
$fp = fopen($file,"w"); // open file with Write permission
fputs($fp, $OUTPUT);
fclose($fp);

Looking at the sql_cache.txt file, it may look something like this:

a:1:{i:0;a:6:
{i:0;s:1:"1";s:11:"category_id";s:1:"1";i:1;s:9:"Computers";s:13:"category_nam
e";s:9:
"Computers" ;i:2;s:25:"Description for computers";s:20:"category_description"
;s:25:"Description for computers";}}

This output is the internal representation of the variables and their types. In this case you are using
mysql_fetch_array() that returns both numeric indexed array and an associative array (which is
why the data seems to occur twice – once with the numeric index and once with the string index).

Using the Cache

In order to use the cache, you will need to unserialize() the information back into the original

format.

You can read the contents of the sql_cache.txt file into a variable using the file_get_contents()

function.

Please note: This function is available in PHP version 4.3.0 and above only. If you are using an older
version of PHP, a simple workaround is using the file() function (reads an entire file into an array,

each new line becomes an array entry). The implode() function is used to join the array elements

into one string to unserialize().

// file_get_contents() workaround for PHP < 4.3.0

$file = 'sql_cache.txt';
$records = unserialize(implode('',file($file)));

You are now able to go through the $records array and get the data from the original query:

foreach ($records as $id=>$row) {
    print $row['category_name']."<br>";
}

Note that the $records array is an array of arrays (a numeric indexed array containing the query

results – each row being a numeric and string indexed array... what a mouthful).

Putting it all together

The decision whether to cache is time based in this instance. If the file modification timestamp is

greater than the current time less the expiration time set, the cache is used, else the cache is

updated.
 Check file exists AND timestamp is less than expiry time set.

 Get the records stored in the cache file or update the cache file.
$file = 'sql_cache.txt';
$expire = 86400; // 24 hours (in seconds)
if (file_exists($file) && 
    filemtime($file) > (time() - $expire)) {
    // Get the records stored in cache
    $records = unserialize(file_get_contents($file));
} else {
    // Create the cache using serialize() function
}

Possible Additions
 Storing cache results in shared memory for faster retrieval.

 Adding a function that runs the SQL query randomly and checks if output is the same as

cached output, if not, the cache is updated (this function can be given the probability of running
once in every 100 script executions). Using a hashing algorithm (such as MD5()) can assist in

determining if the contents of a string or file have changed.

 Adding an administrative function that manually deletes the file, hence forcing the cache to
update (as the file_exists() function above would return false). You can use the unlink()

function to delete the file.

The Script
$file = 'sql_cache.txt';
$expire = 86400; // 24 hours
if (file_exists($file) &&
    filemtime($file) > (time() - $expire)) {
    $records = unserialize(file_get_contents($file));
} else {
    $link = mysql_connect('localhost','username','password')
        or die (mysql_error());
    mysql_select_db('shop')
        or die (mysql_error());
    /* form SQL query */
    $query = "SELECT * FROM categories";
    $result = mysql_query($query)
        or die (mysql_error());
    while ($record = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
        $records[] = $record;
    }
    $OUTPUT = serialize($records);
    $fp = fopen($file,"w");
    fputs($fp, $OUTPUT);
    fclose($fp);
} // end else

// Query results are in $records array

foreach ($records as $id=>$row) {
    if ($row['category_id'] == $_REQUEST['category_id']) {
        // category selected - print bold
        print '<B>'.$row['category_name'].'</B><br>';
    } else {
        // other category - print regular
        print $row['category_name'].'<br>';
    }
} // end foreach

About the Author

Ori Staub is a senior systems analyst, developer and consultant specializing in web-based solutions.
He can be contacted at os@zucker-staub.com

5. Database Query Cache

Step 1, Submit a SQL query. Before submitting, check if such file exists (named after that sql
query) in “cache” folder.
Step 2, If is does exist, check how old the file is.
- Over X days? Load the data from mysql, and update the file.
- Under X days? Open the file, and print it so we don’t need to load the server with a new query.
Step 3, All you have to do to implement this: put your queries in a function. And create a
directory “cache” that is writable (777).  Load the mysql results and write them to a file. For a
webserver opening a file (the cache) is faster then having to connect to mysql, and calculating
the query.

<?

function mysqlGetNewList($sql){

    ob_start();
    
    if(($result=mysql_query($sql))){ 
     
        while(($rs=mysql_fetch_array($result))){
            echo $rs[0];
            //your results printed
    
        } 
    }
    /*
    *Or you can store the SQL result as file directly
without ob_get_contents().
    * $output = rs;
    */
    
    $output = ob_get_contents(); 
    ob_end_flush();
    //all "echo" and "print" are beeing send to var "$output
"
    // next time we have a file ready instead of having to q
uery mysql
        
    $file = @fopen("cache/".$sql.".txt", "w+"); 
    //we write it to a new file named after the $sql query
    @fputs($file, $output); 

//we start here
$sql = "select * from database order by id desc  LIMIT 0, 50
";

//we try to open a file named after the sql query
$fp = @fopen("cache/".$sql.".txt","r");

if ($fp)
    {
    
    $filemod = filemtime("cache/".$sql.".txt");
    //date of the file
    $filemodtime = date("Ymd", $filemod);
    //what date is it now
    $now = time();
    $now = strtotime($time);
    $nowtime = date("Ymd", $now);
    $diverence = $nowtime - $filemodtime;
    
    if($diverence >= 1){
        //older then 1 day? get new
        print "<!-- non cached  $filemodtime - $nowtime = $d
iverence -->";
        mysqlGetNew($sql);
    }
    else
    {
        //get it from cache!
        print "<!-- cached  $filemodtime - $nowtime = $diver
ence -->";
        $buff = fread($fp,1000000);
        print $buff;
    }
}
else
{ 
    //file does not exist. so we try to create the file by s
tarting the function
    print "<!-- error non cached  $filemodtime - $nowtime = 
$diverence -->";
    mysqlGetNew($sql);
}

?>