So, I was asked in IRC today about the proposed short array syntax for PHP. For those that don't know, I mean the same syntax that other languages (javascript, perl, python, ruby) all have. Currently in PHP we have this:

$var = array(1,2,3);

The proposed additional syntax is:

$var = [1,2,3];

So, I voted +1 for this feature on the PHP Internals list. A colleague asked me why I voted +1. At first I had no good answer other than it was just a gut feeling. It just feels like a good addition to the language. It is common among web languages and therefore users coming into PHP from other languages may find it more comfortable.

The best thing I could tell him was that it would make arrays fall in line with other data types in PHP. For example, you never write:

$var = int(1);

$var = string(foo);

So, why oh why do we have to have what …

Contemporary software engineering models include many loosely-defined layers. Database developers might help with other layers, but for the most part a database administrator’s domain is the persistence layer.

• 
  
• Presentation
  
• Application
  
• Business Logic
  
• Persistence (also called Storage)
  

The Daily WTF has an article on The Mythical Business Layer makes the case for not separating the business layer and the application layer:

A good system (as in, one that’s maintainable by other people) has no choice but to duplicate, triplicate, or even-more-licate business logic. If Account_Number is a seven-digit required field, it should be declared as CHAR(7) NOT NULL in the database and …

Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program

The downsides of rdiff are:

…

Well, it has been almost a month.  I know I am late to the blogosphere on my thoughts.  Just been busy.

Again this year, the Phorum team was invited to be a part of the DotOrg Pavilion.  What is that?  Basically they just give expo floor space to open source projects.  It is cool.  We had a great location this year.  We were right next to the area where they served food and drinks during the breaks.  We had lots of traffic and met some of our power users.  IMVU.com is getting 1.5 million messages per month in their Phorum install.  They did have to customize it to fit into their sharding.  But, that is expected.  A guy (didn't catch his name) from Innobase came by and told us that they just launced InnoDB support forums on their site using Phorum.  Cool.  So now …

A coworker found out how secure Amazon's MP3 store is.  Even big guys like Amazon make errors in their web site security.
So, I clicked purchase and the album immediately started downloading. It was at this point that I had the thought cross my mind: "Did I update my credit card info?"

Well, no, I didn't. Before the album finished downloading, I was trying to change the method of payment. Turns out, for a digital purchase, you can't do such a thing. So, I waited and wondered was was going to come of this...

UPDATE: There are some examples being added at the MySQL Forge now.

When I first started installing MySQL for myself, it was quite handy to have the example my.cnf files in the source package. I was a noob to the MySQL configuration. Even after I became more experienced, I would use them as a starting point. However, I now find that they are so behind the times they are not as useful. Here are some of the comments from the files.

my-small.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (<= 64M) where MySQL is only used
# from time to time and it's important that the mysqld daemon
# doesn't use much resources.

my-medium.cnf

# This is for a system with little memory (32M - 64M) where MySQL plays
# an important part, or systems up to …

While I was at the MySQL Conference, I sat down with Michael Kimsal of WebDevRadio and recapped the two talks that I gave at the conference.  I have uploaded the slides so you can follow along if you want.

One to a Cluster - The evolution of the dealnews.com architecture.

MySQL Tips and Tricks - Some simple tips and some of the more advanced SQL we use in Phorum.

Thanks Michael.  Any time you need a guest, just let me know.

So, I mentioned before that I found out about index_merge at the MySQL Conference. I was wondering why I had not heard more about it since it came out in 5.0.3. When talking with some MySQL people about it, I received mixed results. So, I decided to kind of run my own tests on some data and see what I could figure out.

I apologize for Wordpress' bad output. =(

The Data

I created a table with 5 million rows. Early tests with MySQL's Harrison Fisk (HarrisonF) over my shoulder with small data sets showed MySQL would optimize out the indexes in favor of table scans. I wanted to avoid that. This is my table schema:


CREATE TABLE `test2` (
`id1` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
`id2` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
`id3` int(10) unsigned …