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MySQL

  • in MySQL, php
  • 1 min read

I'm looking for another Dark Apprentice

I'm looking for someone who wants to hone their existing 3+ years of C hacking and debugging skills on some of the fastest, most highly stressed core infrastructure applications ever created.

The full job description is available on the OmniTI Careers page.

A successful applicant for the position will join the ranks of my Dark Apprentices and will have the opportunity to learn and develop skills such as:

  • Performant, scalable thinking. Writing and troubleshooting code that runs in high stress environments.
  • Sith debugging. Mastering the inner mysteries to deduce ways to effectively reproduce and resolve otherwise impossible problems.
  • All the fun and happy details of the various email specs.
  • Dry wit. You'll have the option of picking up some of my British humour.

There's plenty of scope for developing these skills and more.

If you're interested in this position, or know someone else that might be, please direct resumes to jobs[at]messagesystems.com.

(I hope the folks an planets mysql and php don't mind the cross posting; we do do work with both PHP and mysql, so it's not totally off topic. Thanks for reading!)

  • in MySQL, php
  • 1 min read

PDO FUD; less anecdotes, more facts

I was just skimming over Santos' Post about SDO, and was saddened to see more anecdotes and less facts.

Here are two points that you should take note of:

I'd love to see someone run some fair comparisons and publish the numbers.

more PDO PECL releases

PHP 5.1.3 was just released, including the latest PDO and PDO drivers. If you're still running older releases of PHP you should probably upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade the PHP core then you'll be pleased to know that I've also released the PHP 5.1.3 versions of PDO, PDO::MYSQL, PDO::PGSQL, PDO::SQLITE and PDO::ODBC to PECL--these are the versions that I've had time to personally test.

These are identical to the code in PHP 5.1.3, with the exception of PDO::ODBC, which includes two additional bug fixes that didn't make it in time.

Enjoy!

On a related note, I noticed that people were downloading PHP 5.1.2 and then trying to build older PDO drivers from PECL into it, and then filing bugs when it didn't work. Don't do that; it really doesn't make sense. As a general rule, PHP 5.1 and higher bundle PDO, so if the version of PHP you are using is newer than the latest PECL package, stick with the version of PDO that ships with PHP. If the PECL package is newer, then go for that instead.

PDO::MySQL slides from MySQLUC 2006

I tried to upload my slides from the conference, but run into problems with a firewall somewhere, so they've had to wait for me to return home.

So, here we are: Using MySQL with PDO (PDF).

This was my first MySQL users conference, and it seemed to go well. Truth be told, I'm not a database fanatic (which is ironic considering my involvement with PDO), so I didn't find a lot of the material to my taste. I did learn a few things from Jim Winsteads embedded mysql talk (something I bet he'll be surprised to hear :) and also Hartmut Holzgraefe's mysqli talk. I also got to chat to Monty about the issues I mentioned and meet some new faces, including my Evil sysadmin, some old and some older faces (Hi Sterling :)

The conference was quite big; 1500 attendees, 6 tech tracks (there were a couple of other non-tech tracks too, but I forget exactly what they covered) and a lot of BOF sessions. If MySQL is your bread and butter, you might want to consider attending the next one.