Most efficient way to fetch a specific option from the DB?

Question

Basically, I'm wonder what would be the sibling function to:

function qa_set_option($name, $value, $todatabase = true) {...}

Something like this:

function qa_get_option($name, $fromdatabase = true) {...}

So basically I need to go dodge the cache, get to the database, fetch the value and then update the cache. How should I proceed in order to only fetch the given option and not the whole table?

Comments

Am I missing something with your question? The qa_opt ()function gets or sets an option from the database. And the options are cached once retrieved.

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The issue is that, due to another related question I've made (http://www.question2answer.org/qa/30898), I need to access the DB directly, avoiding the cache. So the cache will not be up-to-date with the data in the DB. So I need to hit the DB directly or, at least, refresh the cache. But I couldn't find a function that would allow me to get data directly from the DB and then update the cache (like the "fromdatabase = true" I mentioned in the question) only for a given option.

Another alternative would be to somehow invalidate the cache. I haven't seen anything related but I haven't looked for it. That might be useful too and extremely simple to implement as, I guess, it would only mean unsetting a value in the options array.

Answer 1

The best solution I can think of does not use a magic core function but rather builds the SQL from scratch:

function getSettingFromDb($id) {
    return qa_db_read_one_value(qa_db_query_sub('
        SELECT content FROM ^options
        WHERE title = $', $id, true));
}

Seems to be working fine. Note that if the cache differs (which is most likely, otherwise why would you be using such a function?) this will not update the cache.