NYCPHP Meetup

[Dan Cech]

Daniel Convissor wrote:
> Hi Cliff:
> 
> On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 07:08:11AM -0400, Cliff Hirsch wrote:
>> Is serializing/unserializing object/arrays for storage/retrieval in a
>> MySQL db truly reliable?
> 
> Depends on what you're doing.  We use them to store history.  For example, 
> our update method finds the diff between the old and new data.  The diff 
> contains the old values that are about to be changed, in an associative 
> array format with column names as the keys.  We then serialize that and 
> store it in a history table along with the record id and table name.

This is a pretty common use of serialized data, and one it is fairly
well suited to.

That said, I tend to use a simple xml format for storing these kinds of
fields, for a few reasons.

1. UTF-8 encoding is easy in XML
2. XML is easy to read/edit manually if needed
3. It's harder to break and when you do, easier to fix

Dan