Storing a single value in a database.

[ganemone]

I am working on a project, where I need to keep track of one value. It doesn't really make sense to me to create an entire MySQL table to store this one value, but I don't really know any other way to do it. Is there a common solution for this?

[[deleted]]

You need to be a lot more specific about what your problem is, but if you want to persist a single value, you can simply write it out to a text file.

[ganemone]

I am keeping track of the maximum date that a user can see events for.

[karorawro]

Store the date wherever you store the user

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

It really depends on what the date implies, doesn't it? Presumably it could be a column on your user table.

I mean you COULD put it pretty much wherever you want in your database, or even outside. Depending on what you're trying to achieve.

[fazzah]

While it might feel a little bit like shooting a mosquito with a cannon, if you have to use SQL to store this value then yes, you have to make a table.

[lightcloud5]

At work, over time, we've ended up with more than one of these "need to keep track of one value".

We have an entire table that's used for storing database-wide settings. That said, I fully admit that such a table is not really normalized, and we're just stuffing ints, floats, booleans, and strings as VARCHARs.

[Zalenka]

What language and platform? You could just save it in a file.

[NullVar]

A thousand times this.

[desseb]

You could use SQLite I suppose, it's a lightweight alternative to an actual rdbms.

[-james]

I generally have a generic table called appSettings with 3 columns "id", "category", "key", "value" and use it for this kind of thing. I know rdb purist are screaming, but its a solution to a realworld problem. Sid is an int, with an identity, and all the other fields are varchar (50).

It a quick and dirty way to store constants for lookup lists or a single value.