Posted by Alan Little on 10/11/06 15:16

I have affiliates submitting batches of anywhere from 10 to several
hundred orders. Each order in the batch must include an order ID,
originated by the affiliate, which must be unique across all orders in
all batches ever submitted by that affiliate. I'm trying to figure out
the most efficient way to check the uniqueness of the order ID.

Order data is being submitted to Zen Cart, and also stored in custom
tables. I have created a unique key in the custom tables, consisting of
affiliate ID and order ID, but that's not workable because the custom
tables need data from ZC, and I don't really want to submit the data to
ZC until I've checked the order IDs, plus part of the batch might already
be stored before I hit a dup, and would then have to be deleted.

There are currently about a half dozen affiliates; I have no idea how
many there will be ultimately. The client I'm developing this for thinks
1-200. Each affiliate can potentially have several thousand order IDs
that need to be checked.

The two ways I'm considering are: 1) a single query to load all the
affiliate's order IDs into an array for checking as I process the batch;
2) creating a temporary table with just the affiliate's IDs, querying it
for each order in the batch.

Any ideas which would be more efficient? Would there be any significant
difference either way?

--
Alan Little
Phorm PHP Form Processor
http://www.phorm.com/

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