[FIXED] Quickly finding the last item in a database Cakephp

Issue

I just inherited some cakePHP code and I am not very familiar with it (or any other php/serverside language). I need to set the id of the item I am adding to the database to be the value of the last item plus one, originally I did a call like this:

$id = $this->Project->find('count') + 1;

but this seems to add about 8 seconds to my page loading (which seems weird because the database only has about 400 items) but that is another problem. For now I need a faster way to find the id of the last item in the database, is there a way using find to quickly retrieve the last item in a given table?

Solution

That's a very bad approach on setting the id.

You do know that, for example, MySQL supports auto-increment for INT-fields and therefore will set the id automatically for you?

The suggested functions getLastInsertId and getInsertId will only work after an insert and not always.

I also can't understand that your call adds 8 seconds to your siteload. If I do such a call on my table (which also has around 400 records) the call itself only needs a few milliseconds. There is no delay the user would notice.

I think there might be a problem with your database-setup as this seems very unlikely.

Also please have a look if your database supports auto-increment (I can't imagine that's not possible) as this would be the easiest way of adding your wanted functionality.

Answered By - Tim