How do I tell when a MySQL UPDATE was successful versus actually updated data?

Question

How do I tell when a MySQL UPDATE was successful versus actually updated data?

Example:

TABLE
id    city_name
1     Union
2     Marthasville

If I run the following:

$data = array('city_name', 'Marthasville');

//update record 2 from Marthasville to the same thing, Marthasville. 
$this->db->where('id', 2);
$this->db->update('table', $data);

if($this->db->affected_rows() > 0)
{
    //I need it to return TRUE when the MySQL was successful even if nothing was actually updated.
    return TRUE;
}else{
    return FALSE;
}

This will return TRUE every time the UPDATE statement is successful, but FALSE when no rows were actually updated.

I need it to return TRUE every time the UPDATE statement was successfully executed even if it doesn't actually change any records.

Answer 1

Have a look at mysql_affected_rows()

It should tell you if anything was actually updated as opposed to nothing was successfully updated resulting in a return of true.

php.net says:

mysql_affected_rows()

Returns the number of affected rows on success, and -1 if the last query failed.

You could use the following to achieve your desired results:

if($this->db->affected_rows() >= 0){ }

Answer 2

Then you would use mysql_query:

SQL statements, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, etc, mysql_query() returns TRUE on success or FALSE on error.

Simple like this:

$result = $this->db->update('table', $data);

if($result)
{
     //without error even no row updated
} else {

}