Today was the first time I used a DELETE statement that joined multiple tables. I didn’t even know you could do that. =)

I needed to look into this because my update function was just taking so much time and memory. We have a little over 3,000 nodes, most of which are usernodes automatically created by the usernode module. I needed to rebuild the node access entries for a few hundred content nodes to take into account the new partner access module I wrote, but node_access_rebuild took quite a while.

The first approach I thought of taking was to delete usernode because we didn’t seem to need it any more. In order to do that, though, I would still have to delete all the user nodes, though, and invoking all the hooks for each of the 2000+ user nodes took a while as well.

The second approach was to delete just the node access records related to the nodes I needed to update. I found a way to do it even faster – instead of querying the node IDs and then deleting individual rows, I could do something like this instead:

db_query("DELETE FROM na USING {node} n
          INNER JOIN {node_access} na ON (n.nid=na.nid) WHERE n.type='%s'", $type);
$rs = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE type='%s'", $type);
while ($row = db_fetch_array($rs)) {
  $node = node_load($row['nid'], NULL, TRUE);
  if (!empty($node)) {
    node_access_acquire_grants($node);
  }
}

(UPDATE: Fixed MySQL statement)

That was interesting. =)

I was also running into memory problems trying to run all the unit tests in one go. I broke it into individual tests with:

drush test list | grep KEYWORD | xargs -n 1 drush test run | tee out

where KEYWORD is the keyword I use to filter the list for just the tests I wanted to run, and out is the file that stores a copy of the results. It’s not neatly summarized, but oh well. =) It works.