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.

On June 21 2008 the third edition of PHP Vikinger will be held in Skien, Norway.

PHP Vikinger is an unconference directed towards everyone who wants to learn more about PHP and likes to discuss and meet with new people. Unlike normal conferences, the talks at an unconference are determined by the attendees, and not by a committee.

Just like in 2006 and 2007, …

Last night, I was fortunate enough to give a presentation called "Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning" at the local Columbus PHP Meetup group. There were about 14 people there, and it was a great time. Lots of good questions! Anyway, I created a new slide deck with some new material on LEFT-join-fu and managing many-to-many relationships that folks might find handy. Below are the slides in OpenOffice Impress and PDF format. Enjoy.

• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (OpenOffice Impress)
• Join-fu: The Art of SQL Tuning (PDF)

…or I’m doing something stupid, in which case I hope someone would enlighten me.

We grab a number of data from two different MySQL servers, get them back as arrays ($ar1 and $ar2) and then we concatenate the two arrays. $ar1 consists of 30 to 200 elements, sometimes more. $ar2 typically contains 30 elements.

The PHP way of doing this is:

$ar1 = array_merge($ar1, $ar2);

and the home-grown version is

foreach($ar2 as $i) {

 $ar1[] = $i;
}

While I do realize that “the PHP way” involves creating a new copy of $ar1 along the way, my assumption before testing this was that, being an internal function with no further parsing or interpretation to be done, it would be much faster.

Doing some microtime() estimations while keeping $ar2 constant at 30 elements, I found:

• At 1-10 elements in $ar1, array_merge is about 33% faster.
• At 20-40 …

Sarah already wrote something about the PHP Unconference, but Mayflower sent a bigger team, so here are some more impressions.

The unconference had a fair share of the "ever-present" people in PHP development and the corresponding open-source community and also people interested in recent features and willing to learn although they came from different backgrounds. This avoided most of the low-level noise and kept the weekend on a very high level.

Both days there were 4 session tracks with 4 talks each for an admirably rich choice of 32 possible sessions, which made it very hard to get hold of everything you're interested in, but this was deliberately planned and I didn't attend a single talk I didn't like. The long coffee-breaks had a very intense tendency to keep the people busy discussing technical questions or just general chatter with old acquaintances that the orga team was busy driving the people to the talks …

Last weekend the PHP Unconference took place in Hamburg. With about 120 participants it took awhile to vote for the offered talks but at the end more than 30 sessions appeared on the agenda for two days and that promised to be an exciting weekend. You'll find all topics and summaries on PHP Unconference Wiki. There were many interesting sessions for choice, for example 'MySQL Performance Tuning' by Kris Köhntopp, with which started the first day. 45 minutes, as it turned out, were not long enough for this talk and I would have liked to hear more about it. During the talk 'Ask the core developer' by Johannes Schlüter the current moods and the future of PHP and the community were discussed, yet not all of the attendees had the same opinion about that. Security, too, was a topic of the unconference and Johann-Peter Hartmann had …

Once again I spent a week in the San Francisco Bay Area. This time around it was for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

I flew in on April 12 (from FRA via LAX to SJC) and arrived in the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in the afternoon.

The next morning I left the hotel around 7:00 in the morning for a genuine experience of what they call public transportation in the bay area. It took me three hours to travel the distance of …

Keynotes

The keynote was kick started by Marten Mickos.  If you've never met Marten, he is, on a personal note, one of the greatest CEOs I've ever met.  The keynotes were especially interesting for me because it was the first time I've had the opportunity to listen to Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems.  Jonathan seems like a great guy who gives the impression he "gets it".

The last keynote was by Werner Vogels of Amazon.  His talk covered Amazon's growth and the new services they offer including EC2.  He announced that EC2 now supports persistent storage, which is a huge improvement, but doesn't quite solve all of the problems.

Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit

I've never been big into testing, but I'm trying to change that.  …

Here is the presentation material I used for my "Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit" presentation at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA today.

| View | Upload your own

A PDF version of the presentation is available here, notes by Joe Stump (Digg.com) are …

We’re in the early stages of revamping a medium-size website, and we want to document the possible paths people can take to complete a given set of tasks. We have the basic site layout/map ready, but we also want to make sure that all bases are covered as far as making sure the information you need is readily available, wherever in the website you are.

What process do you use for planning web site navigation and ensuring that everything is covered? Are there standard tools (a la UML for programming) to cover this sort of task? Know any good books on the subject? If you have any experience in this area, please drop a comment!