Personally, I think I will choose preg_*.

…and Krzysztof makes a good arguement HOWEVER…
Having taken the practice test twice now (wherein the same question came up on both ocasions) where upon I did answer
“preg_* regular expression functions” and on both occasions I scored “EXCELENT” on the
String Manipulation and Regular Expressions section of the test. That said, seeing as there were so few regex questions on either test, do you think it likely that I got it wrong twice and still scored EXCELLENT both times ????

“*In databases that do not support the AUTO_INCREMENT modifier, you must use a LAST_INSERT_ID(id+1) instead to auto-generate a numeric incrementing key.”

I answered “sequence”. A sequence is a database object which stores a sequence of numbers (much like the auto_increment column), but must be called separatly.

So, the “+1 solution” would be something like this:
INSERT INTO table VALUES(LAST_INSERT_ID(SELECT MAX(id) + 1 FROM table), val1, val2).

In this case the call to the LAST_INSERT_ID is redundant, you could use the subquery result as the value to the insert:
INSERT INTO table VALUES((SELECT MAX(id) + 1 FROM table), val1, val2).

But, you have the possibility to put an expression in there (eg: a stored function which can return an unique -global- id for example).

I have scheduled the Zend Exam on Friday 29th, of this month!!
Wish me luck!

By the way, GREAT POSTS, very VERY helpful!

your answer is probably right, But I can’t figure out how LAST_INSERT_ID is working
if I use that query

insert into member (memid,name,firstname,email)
values(LAST_INSERT_ID()+1,’lname’, ‘fname’, ‘test@test.com’)

LAST_INSERT_ID always return 0+1 unless I set SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID(1),LAST_INSERT_ID(2) and so on before each insert query.

could you explain how do you use it, or if you thing it has a better answer
thank you

http://www.zend.com/store/education/certification/authenticate.php?ClientCandidateID=ZEND005514&RegistrationID=225719929

It’s no so obvious (as many other questions in MockExams, heh).
Page 89-90 of Zend PHP5 Certification Study Guide:

“Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (normally abbreviated as “PCRE”) offer a very
powerful string-matching and replacement mechanism that far surpasses anything
we have examined so far.
Regular expressions are often thought of as very complex—and they can be at
times. However, properly used they are relatively simple to understand and fairly
easy to use. Given their complexity, of course, they are also much more computationally
intensive than the simple search-and-replace functions we examined earlier in this chapter. ”

And finally:

“Therefore, you should use them only when appropriate—that is,
when using the simpler functions is either impossible or so complicated that it’s not worth the effort.”

Then, on http://pl.php.net/manual/en/ref.regex.php we can read:

“Tip

PHP also supports regular expressions using a Perl-compatible syntax using the PCRE functions. Those functions support non-greedy matching, assertions, conditional subpatterns, and a number of other features not supported by the POSIX-extended regular expression syntax.”

and because of this complexity of PCRE the implementations of preg_ functions are much more complicated. That’s why using them should be avoided if not necessary.

That’s my opinion and I would choose ereg

I think the answer is: preg_*

I found it in php manual:
Note: preg_match(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to ereg().

http://uk3.php.net/ereg