What is the best practice for storing the start and end time of a page request in a MySQL database in PHP?

When storing the start and end time of a page request in a MySQL database in PHP, it is best practice to use the `DATETIME` data type for the columns that will store the timestamps. This allows for easy manipulation and comparison of the timestamps in queries. Additionally, it is recommended to use PHP's `date()` function to format the timestamps in a way that is compatible with MySQL's `DATETIME` format. 

// Get the current timestamp for the start time
$start_time = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Perform some operations or page rendering here

// Get the current timestamp for the end time
$end_time = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Insert the start and end time into the database
$query = "INSERT INTO page_requests (start_time, end_time) VALUES ('$start_time', '$end_time')";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

if($result) {
    echo "Page request logged successfully.";
} else {
    echo "Error logging page request: " . mysqli_error($connection);
}

Keywords

PHP MySQL database timestamp datetime

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