Counting how many times a rating was entered in a MySQL Database using PHP

Question

I'm trying to count how many times an article has been rated by my members buy using PHP to count a certain articles total entered ratings that have been stored in my MySQL database.

I really want to use PHP and not MySQL to do this and was wondering how I can do this?

I hope I explained this right?

An example would be very helpful my MySQL database that holds the ratings are listed below.

Here is the MySQL database.

CREATE TABLE articles_ratings (
id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
ratings_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
users_articles_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
user_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
date_created DATETIME NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);


CREATE TABLE ratings (
id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
points FLOAT UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

Answer 1

If that's really what you want, you could SELECT the ratings and then use http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-num-rows.php to count them. Is this what you had in mind?

Answer 2

It's much easier just to do it with SQL:

select count(*) from articles_ratings where id = (id value)

You could of course just select * from articles_ratings where id = (id value), then loop through all the rows to count them -- but if the database can do all this work for you, then it's usually best to use it!

Answer 3

"I really want to use PHP" - this will mean you will retrieve all rows from MySQL server and count them using PHP loop?

This is wrong - use SQL to aggregate information, then retrieve it from database.