In our last episode (How I constructed a cross database query in MySQL) I learned how to construct a cross database query in MySQL. This worked great but when our hero tried to use this newfound knowledge in PHP he found his best friend FAIL waiting for him.
I took a look at mysql_select_db for PHP. This seems to imply that if I want to use MySQL with PHP, I have a couple of choices:
Use
mysql_select_dbbut be stuck with only using one db at a time. This is our current setup and putting a database as a namespace identifier doesn't seem to work (it works fine in the MySQL shell so I know it's not a problem with our MySQL server setup).Don't use
mysql_select_db. From some of the examples I've seen, this seems to mean that I have to specify the db for every query that I make. This makes sense since I haven't usedmysql_select_dbto tell PHP what db I want to access. This also makes sad since I don't want to go through all my code and prepend a db name to every query.
Is there something better than this? Is there a way for me to do a cross db MySQL query in PHP without having to something crazy like (2)?
CLARIFICATION: None of the proposed answers actually let me do a cross db query. Instead, they allow me to access two different DBs separately. I want a solution that allows me to do something like SELECT foreign_db.login.username, firstname, lastname from foreign_db.login, user where ... NOT just make different queries to different DBs. For what it's worth, (2) doesn't work for me.