In what situations would using the INSERT IGNORE INTO approach be beneficial over manually checking for record existence before insertion?

When dealing with database operations, using the INSERT IGNORE INTO approach can be beneficial when you want to avoid duplicate entries in a table without having to manually check for record existence before insertion. This approach allows you to insert a new record into the table only if it does not already exist, saving you the extra step of querying the database to check for duplicates.

// Connect to the database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare the SQL statement with INSERT IGNORE INTO
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT IGNORE INTO my_table (column1, column2) VALUES (:value1, :value2)");

// Bind the values to the parameters
$stmt->bindParam(':value1', $value1);
$stmt->bindParam(':value2', $value2);

// Execute the statement
$stmt->execute();