At frist I thought this story featured in the Economist was too funny to resist, given the title. After reading it, the tale turns out to be quite inspiring; definitely worth checking out.

The long awaited version 4.0 of the MySQL database is now available for download at the MySQL website. The new version is intended as a platform for building mission critical, heavy load database solutions, and much effort has been put into providing a solid foundation for planned enhancements, some of which are included from the start.

This is the text as it appears on the homepage of the MySQL site. If you go a bit further into the article you’ll find the really exciting stuff is expected to appear in 4.1:

• nested subqueries
• stored procedures
• foreign key integrity

I’ve included a HTML Character Entity reference here, you never know when you’re going to need this. I’m always finding myself searching for these damned codes Click read more for the full table.

Another idea that many PHP developers are picking up on to keep their code clean – the short way to echo variables.

When you need to echo a PHP variable in the middle of a block of HTML code, the normal procedure is to open the PHP tags before the variable, and print it out using the echo command. There is an alternative shorthand way of doing this (that also works in JSP and Broadvision) click read more for the diagram.

reported from a PHP user: PHP (interpreted code) is much slower than compiled code (COM). Especially when all of my PHP code is OO. The Object-Oriented version of the PHP code is about 3 times slower than the shorter procedural version. I can write a simple PHP script and achieve 8000+ hits, but change it to Object-Oriented code and it achieves 1000-2000 hits. By porting a PHP library to a COM object I improved performance (of the OO-PHP code) from under 1800 hits at 8 threads to over 3800 to 8600 hits at 8 threads stress level.