Just went through all my PHP testing against a fresh instance of Oracle with Zend Server Community Edition 6, and found these warnings, guess that’s pretty clean for the Oracle part of the installation. I didn’t notice it before because generally I do most of my PHP development against a MySQL database. I should have been configuring the php.ini file routinely, as qualified in this PHP forum discussion.

Warning: oci_set_client_info(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your

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This little guide will describe the steps you have to take to use utf-8 in a complete web application using MySQL and PHP. The Database You have to specify the utf8 character set on all tables and text columns in your database. This will ensure that MySQL stores and retrieves the values encoded in UTF-8. [...]

Sometimes we encounter odd application responses that seem to make no sense. One of these such issues is related to running virtual server instances (OS Containers not Para-Virtualized VMs) and attempting to back up their data to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. For moderately sized virtual machines running MySQL databases or Python/PHP based websites and code repositories this can be an inexpensive, quickly provisioned, and easy way to provide disaster recovery backups in numerous geographic locations, since we generally want DR content to be located in a physically distant location. Nevertheless, we can encounter errors if using an S3 mount in a distance location from our server if the timezone/sync data is incorrect.

The commonly seen error is as follows – and it doesn’t give much information for

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This month is a special month. It’s not because of President’s Day or even the exciting day where we revel in groundhogs. No, this month is special because the free book give-away is happening again. This is where you, the reader, gets to win something free for doing nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want a copy of my recently published book – The InnoDB Quick Reference Guide from Packt Publishing. The book is a great reference for DBAs, PHP, Python, or Perl programmers that integrate with MySQL and want to learn more about the InnoDB database engine.

So, all you have to do is post a comment here saying that you want a copy and write out a single (or more) sentence about how you use InnoDB in your

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I’m pleased to announce that my first book, the InnoDB Quick Reference Guide, is now available from Packt Publishing and you can download it by clicking here. It covers the most common topics of InnoDB usage in the enterprise, including: general overview of its use and benefits, detailed explanation of seventeen static variables and seven dynamic variables, load testing methodology, maintenance and monitoring, as well as troubleshooting and useful analytics for the engine. The current version of MySQL ships with InnoDB as the default table engine, so whether you program your MySQL enabled applications with PHP, Python, Perl or otherwise, you’ll likely benefit from this

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When will it stop. These amateur programmers that simply cut/paste code really affect those good programmers in the ecosystem trying to make a decent living. I was reviewing a developed (but incomplete) PHP/MySQL system using a common framework (which in itself is irrelevant for this post).

In one source file there were 12 repetitions of the following code:

   //permissions
    $this->security_model->setUserPermissions($id);
    if (!array_key_exists($id,$this->session->userdata['permissions']) OR
	!array_key_exists('id', $this->session->userdata['permissions'][$id]) OR
	!array_key_exists('scope', $this->session->userdata['permissions'][$id]['name'])){
      $this->session->set_flashdata('alert', 'You are not authorized to go there.');
      redirect($this->agent->referrer());
    }

It’s bad enough when code

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Last October I posted an example and description of a common_lookup table. It was intended to show how common_lookup tables support drop down selections in web forms. However, it wasn’t adequate to show how they work with existing data, and the function only supported fresh queries.

This post goes to the next level, and shows how to use foreign keys to preselect values for display in web forms. It also rewrites the prior function so that it supports querying existing data and inserting new data.

Let’s start with data stored in join between two tables – the member and contact tables. The internal lookup uses the customers name from the contact table to find the membership account information in the

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Using MySQL replication gives you an opportunity to scale out read queries. However, MySQL replication is asynchronous; the slave may fall behind. This Wednesday, January 23 2013, I'll be presenting a free webinar about using MySQL replication on busy PHP web sites.  Register here:  http://www.percona.com/webinars/readwrite-splitting-mysql-and-php Applications have variable tolerance