Tag: MySQL

Rounding Up The Remaining Database Posts

To finally be able to close my now-ready-to-be-archived Firefox-window, I’m rounding up the three other posts I were going to post about in one single batch here:

Ulf Wendel has a post up about PDO_MYSQLND: The new features of PDO_MYSQL in PHP 5.3. Besides being yet another introduction to how MYSQLND differs from the regular libmysqlclient, Ulf writes in detail about how mysqlnd brings other speedups to PDO in general, by allowing the drivers to return zvals directly. This allows the driver to return data without requiring an explicit copy by the overlying architecture. Interesting stuff and well worth a read for anyone, regardless if you actually know what a zval is.

Nicklas Westerlund has a post about MySQL Back to Basics: Analyze, Check, Optimize, and Repair on the pythian blog, featuring a overview of the useful – and abused – methods of rescuing and keeping your data intact. Do regular and good backups. It’s as easy as that. This might however help when you’re in a hurry or needs to fix a corruption that has occured. Read it.

The last item on today’s list is Sphinx – a free open-source full-text search engine. Sphinx uses it’s own indexing and retrieval system, while Solr is built on top of Lucene. Haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but it’s worth checking out. A native PHP module has also popped up (and that’s where I read about it just now), so if you need a fast and native PHP interface to a full search engine without blowing the big bucks, this may be what you’re looking for.

Drizzle – Making MySQL Leaner and Meaner

As noted I recently went for a total of five days of vacation. In the meantime, the intarwebs of blogospheres and the seas of web 2.0 exploded with posts and discussion over Drizzle. Drizzle is a fork of MySQL with the intention of making things more suitable for cloud computing and the regular web use cases. I’m actually quite intrigued by this, and I really look forward to getting some more time to read up on the issues at hand. It will be interesting to see how things compare to CouchDB, Amazon S3, Solr and other service that take a different road than regular relationial databases. Interesting. Anyways, here’s the posts I’d suggest checking out to get better and more usable information about Drizzle:

I’ll take it for a testdrive as soon as the first public version becomes available, and I’m looking forward to it. Might be fun!

Getting a Look Behind the Scenes of PDO

Ulf Wendel is presenting several good articles about the process about implementing the mysqlnd library for PDO as PDO_MYSQLND. I wrote about PDO_MYSQLND when it first was announced, but Ulf has posted two good articles about the implementation of PDO_MYSQLND since then. These articles provide a unique insight into how PDO is built and what challenges lies ahead for PDO2 (.. in addition to the license and NDA debate..)

Remember that you can always follow the latest developments over at Planet PHP.

The First Presentations From php|tek Online

php|tek is taking place halfway around half of the world for me, but the first presentations from the conference is beginning to appear online now. The first three presentations are from Brian DeShong and Maggie Nelson:

While Brians two presentations were mostly familiar stuff for me, Maggie’s presentation touched something that has troubled me time over and again, and that Christer and me has been looking for a good solution to. We’re currently experiencing the problems described, and I’ve been searching several times for a good tool to generate sqldiffs (and not for the _values_ of most of the tables). I’m waiting eagerly for the first release, and as soon as things are up and running, I’ll look into if there’s anything I can contribute.

Discovering innotop

Stumbled across a post by Sunny Walia (.. I tried finding your name, but it’s not on your about page, in your title or on the top of your page, so I had to dig through my feedreader) about installing innotop under RedHat. I’ve never heard about innotop before, but after a bit of using the almighty Google (or you could just follow the link in the last part of the linked article), I found the man page for innotop. It’s a tool with an user interface similiar to the regular unix tool top, but for supervising the current state of your innodb tables instead. Several examples of output are given in the man page.

Using MySQL Proxy to Update Memcached

Jan Kneschke has a very interesting post about how you could use replication and MySQL Proxy to mark entries as dirty in memcached. This way you’re able to expire the data from memcached when it actually is updated on the database level, without having to add another level of abstraction in your application. A very novel approach and it’ll be nice to see how this plays out in practice with 5.1.