Update: Terry Chay has answered my question about why this is happening. In a nutshell, PHP is using 33,160 opcodes and 33,157 regsters for the verbose code. In comparison, the serialized array only uses 5 opcodes and 2 registers. He used something called VLD, which I had not heard of, to figure all this out.

So, at dealnews, we have a category tree. To make life easy, we dump it to an array in a file that we can include on any page. It has 420 entries. Expanded, one entry may look like:

$CATEGORIES[202]['id'] = "202";
$CATEGORIES[202]['name'] = "clothing & accessories";
$CATEGORIES[202]['parent'] = "0";
$CATEGORIES[202]['standalone'] = "";
$CATEGORIES[202]['description'] = "clothing";
$CATEGORIES[202]['precedence'] = "0";
$CATEGORIES[202]['preferred'] = "0"; …

There's a nice article by Jennifer Mears of TechWorld on why Union Bank of California has switched from AIX to Red Hat Linux and the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP).  This article goes in greater depth than the earlier reports interviewing CTO Mok Choe on the reason for the move, the applications etc.  Union Bank is one of the 25 top banks in the United States and while a lot of firms in the financial service sector are using the LAMP stack and JBoss, few have been willing to go on the record.  It's smart marketing on their part.  Not only does it show that they are not locked into closed source legacy software, it's makes Union Bank a more interesting place for IT staff who want to keep their skills up to date.

Choe took a gradual well thought out approach to adopting open source, ensuring that they …

Thanks to Google we have a few tech talks about MySQL. One talk about NDB and another about MySQL performance tuning.

I know this stuff and even I learned a few things.

Drupal open source CMS project forms a non-profit…Ingres announces the availability of its Icebreaker software stack…GPLv3 deadline slips…and more…

The Drupal Association - The Drupal Project’s New Non-Profit, Drupal Association (Press Release)

Exist Global Inc. Announces Venture Funding to Fuel Global Expansion, Exist Global (Press Release)

Registration Opens for First Red Hat Challenge, Red Hat (Press Release)

Ingres Makes Icebreaker Software Appliance Generally Available, Ingres (Press Release)

…

Every now and then I get a big reminder of how great it is to be a part of the open source way of doing things. Having a strong community of MySQL lovers who use the free and open source MySQL database server and pay MySQL AB with code contributions and bug reports is truly a great way to develop rock solid and innovative software. Some contributions that come back to MySQL are small, but others are very large indeed. What would be large, you ask? How about a new, powerful transactional storage engine?

MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, has added TRUMPF Laser GmbH + Co. KG as a customer for the embedded version of its database. TRUMPF has selected MySQL to control the pulsating solid-state laser in its TruPulse series of welding tools.

Thanks to Google we have a few tech talks about MySQL. One talk about NDB and another about MySQL performance tuning.

I know this stuff and even I learned a few things.

I’m finally taking the time to continue this series =)

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three <

Lyrics Grep

For testing purposes, I went ahead and scraped about 60,000 song lyrics off of a number of sites and developed a simple search engine for them. The script that did the scraping is pretty nasty (to handle equally nasty HTML that I had to parse through), so I’m going to refrain from posting that script and save myself some embarrassment. Make a pot of coffee, sit down, and write one yourself (or something else that’s similar enough).

Database Schema

I created a new database called lyricsgrep with the following simple …

I spent some time talking with Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic, today, and am very glad I did. I've been operating under a two-years old understanding of OpenLogic's business, and it's time for an upgrade.

OpenLogic is not a "stack provider." Rather, it provides a gateway to a high-quality library of open source projects, certified to work together, with the ability to apply and enforce policies around adoption and deployment of those projects.

Interestingly, OpenLogic's technology isn't solely applicable to open source. It actually allows enterprises to extend the OpenLogic library with open source or proprietary modules (applications/databases/whatever) that they prefer. Enterprises, for example, may be an Oracle shop, and …

Let me preface this by saying this is my personal opinion and does not express any official MySQL standpoint.

While certainly not the first to issue the statement, "MySQL Is Not a Real Database", yesterday Dave Dargo, advisor to Ingres, blogged about his thoughts on why indeed MySQL is not a real database. Let me present my thoughts about this now-long-tired strain of thought.

Dave, while acknowledging that MySQL is "one of the most successful database systems out there", states the he holds self-evident that "MySQL is not a real database". I think Dave, and thousands of other professionals in our industry, are missing the point: MySQL isn't trying to conform to some decades-old definition of what is a "real" database. Why? Because we aren't stuck in the past; we're forging ahead with technology, concepts, and application …