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Hello, I'm wondering how UNIX_TIMESTAMP works in MySQL. I tried reading about it, but all that expert-mumbo-jumbo made absolutely no sense to me. Can anybody please explain a bit about it?

Also, I'm trying to make a " Users Online " function and I'm wondering what is the best way to insert and extract the date and time from a table?

One way to see it, essentially, is as the time() function in PHP. It just returns the amount of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00

Temor wrote:Also, I'm trying to make a " Users Online " function and I'm wondering what is the best way to insert and extract the date and time from a table?

Inserting a timestamp would probably be easiest as you can do the maths with a single number much easier than if you stored a MySQL date format value.

What is the most reliable way to insert a timestamp?
I really suck at MySQL, so I'm not really sure about anything when it comes to inserting time and dates in a table

You can use the UNIX_TIMESTAMP() function in the VALUES part of the INSERT query, for example,

INSERT INTO `table` (`list`, `of`, `columns`)
VALUES ('value', UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), 'other value');

would insert a timestamp into the of column in the table table.

jacek wrote:You can use the UNIX_TIMESTAMP() function in the VALUES part of the INSERT query, for example,

INSERT INTO `table` (`list`, `of`, `columns`)
VALUES ('value', UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), 'other value');

would insert a timestamp into the of column in the table table.

Alright, I'll try it out

I've hit a snag... I got it to insert it properly. But it keeps repeating itself over and over every time I call the function. ON DUPLICATE KEY ENTRY gives me an error.

Here's my current SQL statement:

	$sql = " INSERT INTO `users_online` (`username`,`last_activity`,`null`)
			VALUES ('{$username}', UNIX_TIMESTAMP(),'null')";
			
	mysql_query($sql);

Please help me

Temor wrote:But it keeps repeating itself over and over every time I call the function

What do you mean by that.

Temor wrote:ON DUPLICATE KEY ENTRY gives me an error.

I think you mean ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, also what is the error ?