What is the recommended way to retrieve data from a MySQL database and calculate the sum of a column using PHP?

To retrieve data from a MySQL database and calculate the sum of a column using PHP, you can use a SQL query to fetch the data from the database and then iterate over the result set to calculate the sum. You can use the MySQL SUM() function in your SQL query to calculate the sum directly from the database. 

<?php
// Connect to MySQL database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

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

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

// SQL query to retrieve data and calculate sum
$sql = "SELECT SUM(column_name) AS total_sum FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    // Output data of each row
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Total Sum: " . $row["total_sum"];
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();
?>

Keywords

PHP MySQL data retrieval sum calculation SQL query

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