Join SELECT an UPDATE?

[l008comm]

My site has a simple counter. there are two queries that run back to back. Is there any way to join these into one query? Even if it just reduced the number of database connections, this page gets loaded a lot, any little optimization will be magnified a lot.

1)

UPDATE `counter` SET main_counter = main_counter + 1

2)

SELECT `main_counter` FROM `counter`

[Demaestro]

You can do it in a transaction...

the syntax depends on what db/version you are using.

Check the user guide of your db for TRANSACTION