Duplicate records inside 'accounts' table

Asked Jan 14 '16 at 18:33

Active Jan 14 '16 at 18:42

Viewed 14 times

I've created a PHP server and connected it to a Amazon RDS MySQL database to store and manage user accounts.

A few days after I've launched my server I've noticed some rows with the same email address.

When I'm inserting a new user I'm checking if that email already exists so that I can specifically avoid this problem.

function userExists($email) {
    global $DATABASE;
    $rows = $DATABASE->GetRows('users', 'email = \'' . $email . '\'');
    if($rows->num_rows >= 1) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

I'm managing to duplicate this by sending multiple requests very quickly. I guess this happens when the client got a really bad internet connection or is really far away.

What would be the best approach to get rid of this problem?

Thank you!

edited Jan 14 '16 at 18:42

asked Jan 14 '16 at 18:33

Alex Ionescu

it's best to set a UNIQUE constraint if you haven't already done so. – Funk Forty Niner Jan 14 '16 at 18:33
You should also normalize e-mail addresses with `strtolower();` – Andrew Coder Jan 14 '16 at 18:35
I got only one column for the email and set its length to 320 chars so it can store any email address. When I'm trying to set a UNIQUE constraint HeidiSQL says that the max key length is 767 bytes. Should I lower the max length? – Alex Ionescu Jan 14 '16 at 18:40

Duplicate records inside 'accounts' table

0 Answers0