Okay, okay, it’s hard to find a use case for this when it’s so obvious that the correct way to handle one-to-many is with JOIN. But if you’re already committed to your schema and you decide you need to append serialized PHP data to a row atomically, you can cons serialized values with this query:

INSERT INTO tbl
  …
  serialized = "i:1;"
  ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
    serialized = CONCAT(
      'a:3:{i:0;s:4:"cons";i:1;',
      VALUES(serialized),
      'i:2;',
      serialized,
      '}'
    )

After you have performed this three times with the serialized values 1, 2, and 3, the row contains this:

'a:3:{i:0;s:4:"cons";i:1;i:3;i:2;a:3:{i:0;s:4:"cons";i:1;i:2;i:2;a:2:{i:0;s:4:"cons";i:1;i:1;}}}'

After unserializing, deconstruct it with this function:

function decons($list) {
    $res = array();
    while ( $list != array() ) {
        if ( $list[0] === 'cons' ) {
            array_unshift( $res, $list[1] );
            $list = $list[2];
        } else {
            array_unshift( $res, $list );
            break;
        }
    }
    return $res;
}

The result:

array(1, 2, 3)

I haven’t actually used it (probably never will) but you are welcome to try this at home!

Proving that this is stupid is left as an exercise for the reader.

We usually do things sequentially in PHP. Any point where we can get two things done at the same time is an opportunity to reduce the total execution time. It is generally safe to execute processes in parallel when no process has a side effect that may impact any other process. Most MySQL SELECT statements fall into this class. Under certain conditions it might help to run these queries in parallel.

So I got to thinking: does PHP provide a function to issue a query and return immediately, instead of waiting while the database churns? Such a function would let me spread a batch of queries across several servers and then collect the results. It should not involve forking or making OS calls. Maybe mysql_unbuffered_query is that function.

Assuming it is, here is the basis for a parallel query system in PHP. It is obviously incomplete. I may complete it and try it out when I need to query a dataset partitioned across separate MySQL instances. The function connect_reserved($query) returns a locked MySQL link identifier, opening new connections as needed. The function release($query) removes the lock, returning the link to the pool of available database connections.

function multi_query($queries);
    foreach ( $queries as $i => $query ) {
        $link = connect_reserved($query);
        $res[$i] = mysql_unbuffered_query($query, $link);
        $ret[$i] = array();
    }

    do {
        foreach ( $res as $i => $r ) {
            if ( $row = mysql_fetch_row($r) ) {
                $ret[$i][] = $row;
            } else {
                release($queries[$i]);
                unset($res[$i]);
            }
        }
    } while ( count($res) );

    return $ret;
}

I have not used mysql_unbuffered_query. For best results, it should return as soon as the server determines that the query is valid. I have assumed that it can return while the database is still looking for records. (If it can not, this whole idea should be forgotten.) This oversimplified diagram helps illustrate how the queries run in parallel. The green line shows the beneficial overlap of query processing time.