If you have been wondering why the overview and graphs pages say “no data to display” on the graphs when you first install Kontrollbase, it’s because there’s no data in the database being returned from the queries that generate the graphs – this is because a new install has no data to graph. This has […]

I was reading a post by Dathan Vance Pattishall titled "Cassandra is my NoSQL solution but..". In the post, Dathan explains that he uses Cassandra to store clicks because it can write a lot faster than MySQL. However, he runs into problems with the read speed when he needs to get a range of data back from Cassandra. This is the number one problem I have with NoSQL solutions.

SQL is really good at retrieving a set of data based on a key or range of keys. Whereas NoSQL products are really good at writing things and retrieving one item from storage. When looking at redoing our architecture a few years ago to be more scalable, I had to consider these two issues. For what it is worth, the NoSQL market was not nearly as mature as it is now. So, my choices were much more limited. In the end, we decided to stick with MySQL. It turns out …

Website health checks are a crucial service to an operations team. In addition to in-house monitoring and service state reporting it’s also important, even critical, to have an impartial third party to run checks to test your customer facing services. There are a lot of companies in this arean that would be glad to have [...]

Most of this stuff is not PHP specific, and Python or Ruby or Java or .NET developers can use the tools in this talk.

The session on joind.in, with user comments/feedback, is at http://joind.in/talk/view/1320.

Slides are at http://talks.php.net/show/confoo10

“My name is Rasmus, I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been doing this web stuff since 1992/1993.”

“Generally performance is not a PHP problem.” Webservers not config’d, no expire headers on images, no favicon.

Tools: Firefox/Firebug extension called YSlow (developed by yahoo) gives you a grade on your site.

Google has developed the …

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

This month will see the release of the book Expert PHP and MySQL which I was a co-author of. Initially this will be available for purchase in PDF format from the Wrox website and I am hopeful this will be available in print format for the MySQL Users Conference.

More then just your standard PHP and MySQL there is detailed content on technologies including Memcached, Sphinx, Gearman, MySQL UDFs and PHP extensions. We will be posting more information at www.ExpertPhpandMySQL.com. You can download a PDF version of Chapter 1 Techniques Every Expert Programmer Needs to Know.

The book includes the following content:

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

In this article you’ll learn how to get user’s rank in mysql query. Check the link http://thinkdiff.net/mysql/how-to-get-rank-using-mysql-query

Some days ago I was working in a quiz project. Where user will play quiz and for each correct answer they will earn points. One of the task of this quiz application was, to get rank of a particular user. Now I am showing how could I solve this problem using mysql query.

Here is the table structure:

CREATE  TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `quiz_user` (
`uid` BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL ,
`participated` SMALLINT UNSIGNED NULL DEFAULT 0 ,
`correct` SMALLINT UNSIGNED NULL DEFAULT 0 ,
`wrong` SMALLINT UNSIGNED NULL DEFAULT 0 ,
`created` DATETIME NULL ,
`updated` DATETIME NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY (`uid`) )
ENGINE = InnoDB

This table contains user records of quiz game. Here is an examples: