Majorca! May 2014 – 17./18! Could there be a better place and time on earth for the PHP EU Unconference: sun, fun, plenty of cheap flights, affordable accommodation? The PHP EU Unconference (tickets) is the international version of the national unconference. The national one frequently sells out quickly (>350 tickets) not only because it matches other conferences despite the ticket price of ~40 Euro only. Traditionally the international one, is more cosy with about 100 elePHPant lovers coming in the years before.

A schedule that really matters – with a solid fallback…

The key to success is the very nature of an unconference. There is no call …

What happens when you take a well known receipt for unconferences, a group of young motivated and talented chefs, some 300 attendees is in the photos below. Some call it, the JavaScript Unconference Hamburg (JS Unconf). Some say, they had seasons in the sun. All I know is, I’ve been there and will come again!

The menu delivered by the chefs is as tasty and sophisticated as that of a commercial conference but it does not cost you a fortune. For some 40,– Euro you get two days packed with talks, intensive discussions and nice fellows. It is the people that drive an unconference and that becomes obvious the very moment you get involved. People know their jobs, they know your problems as they experienced the same. People have something to share and they want to share to with others!

How it works

Like the PHP …

Inspired by Antony, Andrey has implemented a memory optimization for the PHP mysqlnd library. Depending on your usage pattern and the actual query, memory used for result sets is less and free’d earlier to be reused by the PHP engine. In other cases, the optimization will consume about the same or even more memory. The additional choice is currently available with mysqli only.

From the network line into your script

Many wheels start spinning when mysqli_query() is called. All the PHP MySQL APIs/extensions (mysqli, PDO_MySQL, mysql) use a client library that handles the networking details and provides a C API to the C extensions. Any recent PHP will default to use the mysqlnd library. The library speaks the MySQL Client Server …

PECL/mysqlnd_ms 1.6 is currently being modified to support sharding and fully automatic server and client failover when using MySQL Fabric (slides) to manage a farm of MySQL servers. PECL/mysqlnd_ms is a mostly transparent load balancer that works with all PHP MySQL APIs (PDO_MySQL, mysqli, …). The idea is, that if, for example, a MySQL server fails, the plugin talks to MySQL Fabric to learn about alternative servers that Fabric has provisioned automatically. This “talks to” gives implies a performance penalty for applications. One worth looking at, to understand it. One worth looking …

The MySQL Fabric framework brings two major features: automatic client- and server-side failover and sharding. The manual hints, you need a “Fabric aware driver” for this but it does not list one for PHP. First, you don’t necessarily need new drivers! Second, the "driver" for PHP is the current development version of the PECL/mysqlnd_ms replication and load balancing plugin. The plugin covers the sharding but not the failover/HA quickstart example of Fabric: how the plugin works and why you should not use the plugin – yet.

Partial replication: the unlimited mode

At some …

MySQL Fabric is a framework for MySQL Replication high availability, automatic failover and sharding. Technically, a MySQL Fabric daemon monitors a set of MySQL servers and takes appropriate actions upon failure. Clients use Fabric aware drivers to learn about failed servers and shards to distribute queries accordingly. Simple to understand, simple to sell, simple to raise false expectations and simple to fail [, dear Sales]. With the usual blog posts telling only the story of the first three sentences, major parts of the story are covered in silence.

Development preview = announcement of a vision != ready

You first challenge will be to find the documentation for the MySQL Fabric development preview. From the documentation overview page it takes three clicks down to the server side documentation for Fabric:

1. …

For decades MySQL has considered BLOB a sink for data junk that didn’t fit the strictly typed SQL bill. As the outside world began voting for JavaScript, JSON and key-value/key-document stores, TEXT/BLOB was rediscovered as the only way to store JSON inside MySQL. But having no SQL support for the JSON serialization format, JSON remained junk for MySQL. Community developed SQL functions could not cure the issue. That said, MySQL 5.7 introduces SQL functions to work on JSON documents! MySQL slowly takes a different position on JSON.

From the labyrinth: labs.mysql.com

In the recent past, MySQL has developed a talent hiding feature previews at http://labs.mysql.com/. This is where you find …

Modern NoSQL solutions make good, old MySQL Replication appear weak on High Availability (HA). Basically, MySQL users have three choices for MySQL Replication HA: give up on HA, believe that doubling single points of failures means HA, or go for a proper but complex solution. Albeit, as NoSQL world and competition proves, solid HA can be dead simple: embed a Group Communication System (GCS) into MySQL! No single point of failure and near zero client deployment is doable. In parts, the proposal surpassed Pacemaker/Corosync. Read on: story, slides, experimental code.

PoC: Using a Group …

Based on my own limited experience with the Dojo Toolkit, you either love or hate it. First, I disliked the steep learning curve. After a few days, I began to enjoy it, for example, because of the Dijit interface vodoo: spreadsheet (data grid), auto-completion combobox, effects & animation… Many of these GUI elements can be connected to a dojo store. A store is responsible for accessing and manipulating data.

Needless to say how easy it is to populate a sortable, … data grid using a store. Based on the proxy sketched in the previous post, I’ve prototyped two MySQL stores for dojo. One maps to a MySQL table, the other one maps to JSON stored in a BLOB to make MySQL look a …

Over the years JavaScript has become an integral part in every web developers life. The Dojo Toolkit is one of many JavaScript frameworks offering language goodies and interface voodo. It may not be the most used framework but it is a certain beauty to it – once you get used to it. The steep learning curve may be a bit in its way to success. However, to demo how to connect from browser-side JavaScript to MySQL it is about perfect as all its bells and whistles show what can be done, given enough time…

Feel free to skip all the recap sections, if you are familiar with the very basics of AJAX/JSONP.

Recap: JavaScript in a LAMP application

If your web site is driven by MySQL, a mix of a script language (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, …) and you plan to have quite some …