MySQL

Just putting a note as I have spent ages looking for a solution and getting it to work in my environment.

What?
Need to be able to omit HTML tags in certain fields of a mySQL database.

Why?
We are preparing to migrate old content to a new system. From a MediaWiki CMS to a SaaS called Service-Now. The previous interlinking between images could no longer be used.

Why?
I recently made a joomla module that displays the lastest members to signup. It goes a little further and counts activated accounts for the past day, week, month and year (the below examples count all accounts irrespective of being activated or not). It needs to pick up trends as well and compare for example todays, with yesterdays up to the same hour.

How?
I used to use a lot more PHP but since becoming an analyst, I do more at the database level now. What follows should be usable mySQL statements to get all the numbers:

Situation:
I have a silly database table (not mine) storing CMIS Facility week numbers and their starting dates. For those of you unfamiliar with this system, the reason week numbers are different to normal people's week numbers is because these are academic week numbers. So I can't use the built-in functions.

The current structure looks similar to this:

ID        SetID            WeekNumber             StartDate
--------- ---------------- ---------------------- ----------------------------
1         2011/2012        1                      2011-07-18 00:00:00
...
52        2011/2012        52                     2012-07-09 00:00:00

Joe you're an idiot!
You might say to me why not run the CMIS Facility application and add a new set, it will put these dates in automatically.

Herein lies the problem
The reason I'm doing this is for another system which decided to "cleverly" use the exports from CMIS Facility so that all the weeks correspond to the rest of the academic data. Unfortunately the developer wrote a system he felt would last the rest of his PhD degree, it's a shame he started in his last year. He used functions to mktime and simulate the dates. A function goes in with a normal calendar date and returns an academic week number and the week commencing date.

Problem?
The 1st of January 2010 was a Friday. The 1st of January 2011 was a Saturday. The developer felt that as long as you adjust the script each year you could make the system last another year. Shame he also forgot the academic year ends halfway in a normal people's calendar, so you actually have to adjust this twice a year.

The Why
So I find myself writing increasingly complex SQL scripts and it's at the stage where we need to optimize the queries because some scripts are noticeably slow (as observed by the customer...) and then others not.

The What
I'm going to run these benchmark tests against a system that is both up and running via the front-end and back-end. It's MediaWiki CMS used by Wikipedia.org and the like. I like queries against this database because it involves linking a lot of tables and outputting... just articles and their titles.

I have another table holding the audit trail of content approvers on the system. Approvers can e-sign an article (approving it) by clicking on a button. We want to bring back the articles that aren't listed in the audit table (articles yet to be approved).