PHP beginner: Best practice for inserting into multiple tables with foreign key

I'm learning basic PHP MySQL right now.

As of now I have 2 tables; a zoo table (parent table) and a species table (child table).

The zoo table contains ID (PK) and animal_name. The species table contains an ID (PK) and animal_id (FK; zoo.ID) and species_name.

My question here is what is 开发者_如何学运维the best practice to insert into a multiple table when I create a row in the zoo table.

Currently, the idea that comes to my mind is to have 2 SQL statement and the process is like this:-

1. Insert animal_name to zoo
2. Get last ID in zoo table.
3. Close cursor
4. Insert animal_id (last insert ID of zoo) and species_name to species table
5. Close cursor

Is this the best practice? Is there anyway I can improve this process with scalability in mind? (i.e. when I add more tables with foreign key referencing to zoo table in the near future?

I have searched around here and some comrades suggested triggers but however it is not supported in MyISAM storage engine. I'm using MyISAM engine with PHP PDO MySQL object.

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With PDO, you can get the ID of the row you just inserted without another query - just do
$newRowID = $conn->lastInsertId();

where $conn is your database connection.

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Use the MySQL built-in facilities for finding the last generated identity.

So for your Item 2, use this SQL statement:

`SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()`

This gets the last auto incremented ID on your connection. Load that value into a variable, and use that in your Item 4 INSERT statement.

How to Get the Unique ID for the Last Inserted Row with MySQL