What is the best approach to navigate through records in a database without a sequential identifier?

When navigating through records in a database without a sequential identifier, one approach is to use a unique key or combination of keys to order the records. This can be achieved by using the ORDER BY clause in your SQL query to retrieve the records in a specific order. Another approach is to use pagination to limit the number of records returned per page and allow users to navigate through the pages. 

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "dbname";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Query to retrieve records ordered by a unique key
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY unique_key ASC";

$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    // Output data of each row
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "ID: " . $row["id"]. " - Name: " . $row["name"]. "<br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();

Keywords

PHP database navigation non-sequential identifier record retrieval

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