Till's blog

So frequently, I need to run small data migrations or transformations. Especially on the way to Doctrine, there's a lot to clean-up in a database which has been used and evolved over five years or so.

The other day, I wanted to run some transformations on the data located a history column in a pretty simple table — here's what it looks like:

mysql> SHOW FIELDS FROM data;
+-------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| Field       | Type             | Null | Key | Default             | Extra          |
+-------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| id          | int(11)          | NO   | PRI | NULL                | auto_increment | 
| first       | varchar(255)     | YES  | MUL | NULL                |                | 
| last        | varchar(255)     | YES  | MUL | NULL                |                | 
| email       | varchar(255)     | YES  | MUL | NULL                |                | 
| history     | varchar(255)     | YES  | MUL | NULL                |                | 
| rec_datemod | datetime         | YES  |     | NULL                |                | 
| rec_dateadd | datetime         | NO   | MUL | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                | 
+-------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
12 rows in set (0.02 sec)

Building a class to interface the table is simple:

<?php
class Data extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract
{
    protected $_primary = 'id';
    protected $_name = 'data';
}

Now it should be easy to iterate across it, find data and save — wrong!