I do not think MySQL has any scheduling abilities, clever or otherwise. MySQL just obeys orders. Scheduling (correctly, in my opinion) is the province of cron and suchlike.
However, I would suggest, if you have control of the search tools, that you simply put in an extra timestamp field called "hideuntil" into your database, and add conditions into your searches that drop rows for which hideuntil is not null and is after the current time. This has the advantage that you don't waste cycles on cron jobs, the hidden entries become visible at the exact moment the user specified instead of the next time the cron job runs, that you can (if you want to) do searches which include hidden messages, that you are using MySQL to do what it is best at, that your system doesn't have bits of intelligence hanging round in cron jobs... Alec Cawley ---------------------------------------------------------------- You said: I have a PHP based web interface that interacts with MySQL to let users insert data into a table called "Messages". Once an entry is made in this table, other applications read and process the entries, modifying them where appropriate. I would like to add the capability to have this insertion scheduled, so that a user could fill in the details and choose not to insert the data until a particular date and time. My current thought on how to implement this is to have a second table called "PendingMessages" that has the same structure as messages, but with one extra field (scheduleTimestamp) and then have a basic perl script that is run as a cronjob every five minutes that looks for entries that are past their scheduling date and moves them from PendingMessages to Messages. Is this a good way of going about it, or does MySQL have any clever scheduling abilities itself? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
