PHP与MySQL的数据操作速度

Question

Apologies in advance if this is a silly question but I'm wondering which might be faster/better in the following simplified scenario...

I've got registered users (in a users table) and I've got countries (in a countries table) roughly as follows:

USERS TABLE: user_id (PK, INT) | country_id (FK, TINYINT) | other user-related fields...

COUNTRIES TABLE: country_id (PK, TINYINT) | country_name (VARCHAR) | other country-related fields...

Now, every time I need to display a user's country, I need to do a MySQL join. However, I often need to do lots of other joins with regard to the users and the big picture seems quite "join-heavy".

I'm wondering what the pros & cons might be of taking the countries out of the database and sticking them into a class as an array, from which I could easily retrieve them with public method calls using country_id? Would there be a speed advantage/disadvantage?

Thanks a lot.

EDIT: Thanks for the all the views, very useful. I'll pick the first answer as the accepted solution although all contributions are valued.

Answer 1

It would ease stress on your MySQL server to have less JOIN statements, but not significantly so (there aren't that many countries in the world). However, you'll make up that time in the fact that you'll have to implement the JOIN yourself in PHP. And since you're writing it yourself, you will probably write it less efficiently than the SQL statement, which means that it will take more time. I would recommend keeping it in the SQL server, since the advantages of moving it out are so few (and if the PHP instance and the MySQL instance are on the same box, there are not real advantages).