What a nice event the PHP Vikinger has been! Go Vikingers, conquer the world and carry the idea of an unconference into the PHP world. Infect user groups and other community members. Make them feel the power of Thor - as Zak puts it.

You all know what a conference can be like. It can be somewhat like watching TV. At some point of the day, you sit down in an armchair, have a beer or a granita and consume the show from the different channels that you like best. You know which show to watch from the program of the day that you can find in the program guide which has been published weeks ago. Once the show is over, you flip to a different channel and continue starring at the TV box. After some time you usually end up complaining about the crappy program. You ask yourself why it is so difficult to create a good …

Watching the World Cup this year (and yes, I've watched many of the matches - last night's Switzerland vs. Ukraine match took years from my life - it was the essence of boredom), I've been reminded at how differently teams can play the same game. England with its obnoxious long balls into Peter Crouch. France with...well, so far, with nothing. Argentina with its flair and momentum.

Italy, however, takes "difference" to a new level. From today's The Times:

Italy’s method is rooted in pessimism. Ask an Italian whether the glass is half-full or half-empty and he is liable to reply that it is poisoned. Ask an Australian and he will ask if it is a free bar.The Italian I know best - Fabrizio - is no pessimist (He's taking on one of the most interesting and sexy markets on the planet), but the football/soccer he watches certainly is: …

The method I would like to describe is based on the webserver lighttpd.

Lighttpd is a single process webserver written for high traffic sites. It supports fast-cgi out of the box which makes it ideal for hosting PHP applications. There are lots of nice modules for the daily work like mod_access or mod_rewrite. For more infos see the internals

There are also some benchmarks there. Lighty´s home is always worth having a look at.

Continue reading "Methods to reduce the load of your webserver by caching content: using lighttpd, MySQL UDF, LUA and speed everything up."

In the laundry list of items I did today, I pulled the sphinx storage engine code that was just released. I had seen a blog post on its release and I wanted to see how the developers had implemented it.

I have not yet tried the code, I just read through it to see how they implemented it. I had been curious to see how they would do this, since the fulltext code in MySQL is not very well exposed in the storage engine interface (a bit better in 5.1, but not perfect). They took the approach of using a special field in the schema to pass along search queries. This means that you will have to define your tables in exactly their schema format (much how the ha_httplog engine works, though it has a slightly more flexible approach to schema). They reused the Federated connection field to determine location, and did the correct thing of extending the URL mechanism that Federated uses.

They pass the query by identifying the "query" …

So once a week I pull roughly 250,000 RSS feeds in a single snapshot. Its not consistent and only represents what a slice of blogosphere has published at any given time. I've polled websites for years, and more recently URLs/RSS. An article on Business 2.0 got me interested in breaking up the entries by individual word. I was curious to just see how often some words were being mentioned. The Business 2.0 article was on who and what you should not being putting your attention into. It had the "Slashdot is out, and Digg" is in comment.

While I think Digg is a great site, I just do not buy the work Jeremy pointed out on Slashdot vs Digg. Digg may be growing, but I believe that its relevancy is not as high as Slashdot's. I also think that do to the nature of it being an open site with no editorial, eventually it will water down its own effect by being to broad.

The numbers:

mysql> select word_id, word, …

MySQL AB, the developer of the worldâ??s most popular open source database, today announced its participation in the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program as an Alliance-level partner. With over 240 members, Microsoftâ??s VSIP program gives partners the tools and resources they need to successfully integrate their tools, components and services into the Visual Studio 2005 development environment.

C.J. Blathers about recent major changes in his life.

https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.ogg
https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.mp3

Mail me for credentials.

Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse First Boston, enfant terrible of the software analyst community (well, if you're a proprietary vendor, anyway), is at it again. He's got a great "Mavericks vs. Microsoft" series going, with a June 23, 2006 report coming from a call with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. He makes some interesting points, including:

1. Currently a private company, MySQL is...the world's most popular open source database with more than 8 million active installations.

2. The primary revenue stream for the company comes from the conversion of free downloads of its database product into support contracts. So far, the conversion rate to paying customers runs about 1 for every 1,000 downloads. MySQL’s database has been downloaded close to 100M …

Today we put the finishing touches on another article for the Developer's Zone page. This one centered on how to implement foreign keys via triggers into MySQL. This is important when your application requires referential integrity and the storage engine you'd like to use, as in the case of MyISAM or more specifically NDB (Cluster), does not support this functionality natively.

In the article we cover:

• Restricting INSERTS
• Restricting UPDATES and DELETES
• Cascading UPDATES and DELETES

Some of the advantages of foreign key enforcement include:

• Assuming the proper design of the relationships, foreign key constraints make it more difficult for a programmer to introduce an inconsistency into the database.
• Centralizing the checking of these constraints by the database server makes it unnecessary to perform these checks on the application side. This …

Sometime it is needed to handle a lot of rows on client side. Usual way is send query via mysql_query and than handle the result in loop mysql_fetch_array (here I use PHP functions but they are common or similar for all APIs, including C).
Consider table:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `longf` (
2.   `f1` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
3.   `f2` date DEFAULT NULL,
4.   `f3` date DEFAULT NULL,
5.   `f4` varchar(14) DEFAULT NULL,
6.   `f5` varchar(6) DEFAULT NULL,
7.   `f6` date DEFAULT NULL,
8.   `f7` smallint(6) DEFAULT NULL,
9.   `f8` smallint(6) DEFAULT NULL,
10.   `f9` varchar(13) DEFAULT NULL,
11.   `f10` varchar(39) DEFAULT NULL,
12.   `f11` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
13.   `f12` float DEFAULT …