When to close Prepared Statement

Question

When to close prepared statements in PHP?

Example:

    $query = "insert into web_reviews (title,added_date,reviewer_home_url,read_more_link,summary) values(?,?,?,?,?)";     $stmt = $this->db->prepare($query);     $stmt->bind_params($this->title,$this->added_date,$this->reviewer_home_url,$this->read_more,$this->summary);     $stmt->execute() or die("Cannot add the date to the database, please try again.");     $stmt->close();      $stmt = $this->db->prepare("select id from web_reviews where title = ? and read_more = ?");     $stmt->bind_params($this->title,$this->read_more);     $stmt->execute();     $stmt->bind_results($web_review_id);     $stmt->close(); 

Should I use $stmt->close(); here?

Edit:

What is written on the PHP Manual and also one comment from the manual says:

Closes a prepared statement. mysqli_stmt_close() also deallocates the statement handle. If the current statement has pending or unread results, this function cancels them so that the next query can be executed.

Comment:

if you are repeating an statement in an loop using bind_param and so on inside it for a larger operation. i thougt id would be good to clean it with stmt->close. but it broke always with an error after aprox. 250 operations . As i tried it with stmt->reset it worked for me.

Answer 1

That is a good use of close, especially since you are planning on making another query. With both PDO statements and MySQLi statements, I find that erring on the side of cleanliness is almost always for the best -- it removes potential bugs down the line.

As to the gentlemen with 250 operations... I don't see what the real use case is. Why does he need to query the database 250 different times? Why can't he query the database once with 250 records? Or, more likely, why can't he query the database 25 times with 10 records?