How would I delete records after a certain time based on the value of a specific field?

Question

I've got a table called users . Two of the fields in that table are " activation " and " regdate ". Both are VARCHAR. The activation field contains the string "active" if the user has activated the account. If the user has not activated the account, the field contains a string which is a randomized alphanumerical activation key. The regdate field contains the date and time that the user registered the account, populated by date("mdy H:m:s") ;.

What I need to do is create a PHP script which will delete all records that do NOT equal "active" in the activation field and are older than an amount of time that I specify. I know how to locate records by matching criteria such as selecting records where activation equals "active", but I would need it to do the opposite. I would need it to match all records where activation does not equal "active" (because the randomized string would be impossible to match, would it not?).

Of course, I would then have to also compare the selected records to the current time based on those records' "regdate" field.

So, in short, I've got a bunch of records and I want to delete all of the ones that are older than a certain amount of time and have a field that does NOT equal "active".

I apologize if I did not explain this well enough. I'm really tired, and this is also my first post on stackoverflow.

Answer 1

If you convert your regdate field into a DATETIME type, the query can be as simple as:

DELETE FROM users WHERE activation <> 'active' AND regdate < '2011-01-01'

Otherwise, depending on the format of your regdate VARCHAR,you'llhave to CAST or CONVERT it to a DATETIME before comparing it in your WHERE clause.

Is this enough infoforyou togetthisworking?

Answer 2

Change your field in the database to "datetime" using mysqladmin should be a breeze ( the data would look something like this "2011-09-13 02:08:20") then you could use standard mysql commands like:

mysql_query("DELETE   FROM `iplog` WHERE  DATE(datefield)  <= DATE_ADD(CURDATE(), INTERVAL -2 DAY) AND activation <> 'active'");

this is deleting anything older than 2 days in my 'iplog' table and not active.