If you got back through any of the posts I’ve written in the last, say, two years, you’re likely to find me advocating using available APIs over directory database queries nearly every single time.

And the truth is that I still lean in that direction. That is, if there’s an abstraction or an API that’s available for doing something specific, then I try to use it.

But in a couple of recent projects, I’ve been working with some relatively large datasets (large in comparison to non-enterprise level datasets). And in doing so, I have tried to make sure the updates to the data are as fast as possible.

In situations like this, though the WordPress Coding Standards don’t like it, I find direct database queries occasionally to be the best option for doing so under certain conditions.

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Recently, I’ve been working on a project that requires a lot of work with dates. Depending on the nature of the work, there are times in which this can be easier than others.

On the one hand, if you’re making a simple comparison between, say, the values of two months then that’s not a big deal. On the other hand, if you’re dealing with months, days, years, the current date, timezone offsets, and different formats, then it can be a bit more complicated.

The point of all of the above, though, is not about strictly working with dates. Instead, it’s about the challenges that come with needing to write, test, and work with source code.

And if you’re in the habit of writing code, testing it in a browser, doing some form of debugging or dumping information onto a screen, and then repeating the process, there are easier ways to deal with this.

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When retrieving information from the WordPress database I prefer to avoid using direct database queries, but there are times in which they can be useful (and it’s important that it’s done right).

One use case in which it might be helpful is when you need to retrieve a set of data of a single type. Case in point: Say you need to load all WordPress custom fields.

At the time of this writing, there’s no function of which I’m aware that will do this, so here’s how I query the database to do so.

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