I'm new to dynamic web design and am reading through David Power's book "PHP Solutions" so far so good. The project purpose is that ultimatley I'd like to have a single database that I can add image information (like discriptions, file name, date, etc) and then have my website pull from that.
This database will get relativley large in terms of rows, 150+ and I want to be able to select and display the most recent 24 based on the date (integer 20070321 for example). I was thinking of ways to do this in general language, like an if statement to compare dates and assign the greatest 24 to an array, but this seems intensive.
Is there a better way to do something like this or am I heading in the right direction? Would a conditional statement comparing each of the 150+ records make the page slow to load for the user?