Hello,

this question may seem too basic to some, but please bear with be, it's been a while since I dealt with decent database programming.

I have an algorithm that I need to program in PHP/MySQL to work on a website. It performs some computations iteratively on an array of objects (it ranks the objects based on their properties). In each iteration the algorithm runs through all collection a couple of times, accessing various data from different places of the whole collection. The algorithm needs several hundred iterations to complete. The array comes from a database.

The straightforward solution that I see is to take the results of a database query and create an object for each row of the query, put the objects to an array and pass the array to my algorithm.

However, I'm concerned with efficacy of such solution when I have to work with an array of several thousand of items because what I do is essentially mirror the results of a query to memory.

On the other hand, making database query a couple of times on each iteration of the algorithm also seems wrong.

So, my question is - what is the correct architectural solution for a problem like this? Is it OK to mirror the query results to memory? If not, which is the best way to work with query results in such an algorithm?

Thanks!