MySQL and PHP: Select all fields from the same date

Question

I have a table with many fields, one of them is the date (format yyyy/mm/dd). I want to make a query that gets all entries from the days before e make it keep going down. I'm going to try to explain it better with examples.

My query:

SELECT 
    id, 
    date, 
    site, 
    url, 
FROM links 
WHERE online    = "yes"  AND 
      data     <= ?      AND 
      category != ?      AND 
ORDER BY date DESC, clicks DESC
LIMIT 200 

The array:

Array
(
    [0] => 2014/02/25
    [1] => Adult
)

Problem is, I don't want to set a limit. Since the limit would be all the fields from the same date.

I can't set the field date = yyyy/mm/dd because I'm using a script that has an infinite scroll style, so I don't know which date it's gonna be. Besides, I don't have data from all days, so it's gonna fail at some point.

UPDATE 2014/02/25 13:14:00:

I found the solution, don't know if it's the best one, but worked really well.

SELECT 
id, 
date, 
site, 
url
FROM links 
WHERE publish = "yes"  AND 
  date = ( SELECT date FROM links WHERE date < '2014/02/25' ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 1 )
  AND category!= 'Adult' 
ORDER BY date DESC, clicks DESC
LIMIT 200 

So, it's gonna get only the links from 2014/02/24, if it doesn't exists, then it's gonna fetch data from 2014/02/23 and so on.

Answer 1

Store into a variable the last date retrieved. And then use it for the next query. If the query result is empty, then you try again with the day before until you get a result.

You can better your script if you first query a list of "available" dates using a SELECT DISTINCT date for instance

Answer 2

is your date row in the Table of the type "date" ? You should convert the yyyy/mm/dd in yyyy-mm-dd, so you can write it in the table.

The Select could look like this:

SELECT ... 
FROM tabelle
WHERE date BETWEEN '2007-09-20' AND '2007-09-23'

Answer 3

I found the solution, don't know if it's the best one, but worked really well.

SELECT 
id, 
date, 
site, 
url
FROM links 
WHERE publish = "yes"  AND 
  date = ( SELECT date FROM links WHERE date < '2014/02/25' ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 1 )
  AND category!= 'Adult' 
ORDER BY date DESC, clicks DESC
LIMIT 200 

So, it's gonna get only the links from 2014/02/24, if it doesn't exists, then it's gonna fetch data from 2014/02/23 and so on.