Hi Everyone !

I am kind of novice in PHP coding.. have been doing it on and off.. but now want to learn it in more detail. I have some general questions regarding PHP language and would be thankful who can answer it for me.

So here it goes:
1) In PHP what is more efficient to use - Switch-case , If-Else, Do-While for efficient coding ?
2) Is it possible to import data from Excelsheets into Oracle database using PHP ?
3) If I needed to use PHP for Graph plotting.. what are the pros and cons for that ?

Thanks in advance
AB

Depends on what you want to do. Each has its advantages for a particular algorithm. Use the one that requires the least amount of code.

Yes. You can conceivably parse any type of file. In this case someone has probably already written a solution. Google is your friend. There are also extensions to PHP that are written specifically for working with Microsoft file formats.

This requires alot of code for graphics of any quality. But again, there are lots of pre-written solutions, jpgraph http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/, for instance has thousands upon thousands of lines of code. It's resource intensive, anything requiring the generation of graphics is resource intensive. So you'd want to devise a cache system to minimize how often graphics are generated by PHP, such as saving the graphic to the filesystem and writing a cronjob or scheduled task to update the graphic every so often. There are lots of pre-written solutions for plotting graphs as well.

Regards,
Rich

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