Handling Heroku/ClearDB auto Increment primary key strategy
There are basically two strategies to handle that
No auto-increment
Don't use the auto-increment. Simply add the id values yourself, when inserting data. For a table like 'status', that probably contains only static data, you don't dynamically change, that might be good option.
String constants
Check for the string values. And define those strings as class constants.
class YourClass { const ACTIVE = 'Active'; const RETIRED = 'Retired'; ...}And then write your checks as
if($status['name'] == self::ACTIVE){ //do something}I'd recommend to use the second approach, mostly because it makes your code more semantic. Its much easier to see what $status['name'] == self::RETIRED means than $status['id'] == 2
And if you add an index on the name column on that table there won't be (almost) any difference in performance when you query by name instead of by primary key.