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I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a long article. More than likely, I'll put a version of this up on the MySQL developer zone and PHP zone. This article is intended to highlight various basic topics concerning proper methods of handling connections to MySQL databases in PHP, guidelines for caching dynamic content, and a technique called "lazy loading". Hopefully by the end of the article you'll have learned how to combat a very widespread and potentially devastating scalability problem seen in an enormous number of PHP web applications.

An introduction to the problem

Before I start the discussion on connecting to MySQL servers via PHP, it's worth pointing out that the relative cost of connecting to a MySQL database, versus connecting to a PostgreSQL or Oracle installation, is very, very low. However, the fact that connecting to a MySQL resource is inexpensive does not mean that connection resources can be abused. …

Flexible, Scalable Key Mapping Solutions

In working to answer questions on the MySQL forums, I've noticed a few questions that repeatedly come up on a number of the forum areas. One of these particular questions deals with how to manage -- construct, query, and maintain -- many to many relationships in your schema. I decided to put together a two-part article series detailing some of the common dilemmas which inevitably arise when tackling the issue of relating two entities where one entity can be related to many instances of another, and vice versa.

Hopefully, this article will shed some light on how to structure your schema effectively to produce fast, efficient queries, and also will illustrate how key map tables can be queried for a variety of different purposes. I'll predominantly be using standard SQL, so although I'm using MySQL as the database of choice here, …

This month’s Issue 42 of the International Linux Magazine ships with a review I have written about MySQL Administrator.

Zak Greant and Georg Richter have put together an excellent article on the new MySQL extension.

The current issue of the German Linux-Magazin ships with a review I wrote about MySQL-Administrator.