One good news, one bad news - that’s the frank way we blog about mysqlnd. The last posting on significant memory savings (40%) and new tuning options was good news. The bad news: mysqlnd might have bugs. How to report and debug these bugs - using mysqli_debug() - is subject of this posting.

Where to send mysqlnd problem reports, how to contact

Due to a low feedback rate - which is disappointing in a certain way - we are in the comfortable situation that you may report issues or ask questions on pretty much every channel: on the mailing list php@lists.mysql.com, on http://bugs.mysql.com/, on http://bugs.php.net/, by private mail (georg/andrey/uwendel at mysql dot com) or even using a blog comment. Of course, …

Do you happen to have functions that read all rows of a database result into one array, without processing the rows, and pass the array to other functions? For example, do you fetch results in your database class and pass them to a template engine displaying? If so, here is excellent news for you. mysqli_fetch_all(), which comes with mysqlnd, does the task of fetching the data sometimes twice as fast as mysqli_fetch_array(). Reason being: it saves a loop with function calls…

mixed mysqli_fetch_all( mysqli_result $result [, int $resulttype] )

The new API call, which is only available if you build ext/mysqli with mysqlnd support, does fetch all rows of a result set into an array with just one function call:

$all_rows = mysqli_fetch_all($res);

The one mysqli_fetch_all() call does exactly the same as the following loop:

Do you happen to have functions that read all rows of a database result into one array, without processing the rows, and pass the array to other functions? For example, do you fetch results in your database class and pass them to a template engine displaying? If so, here is excellent news for you. mysqli_fetch_all(), which comes with mysqlnd, does the task of fetching the data sometimes twice as fast as mysqli_fetch_array(). Reason being: it saves a loop with function calls…

mixed mysqli_fetch_all( mysqli_result $result [, int $resulttype] )

The new API call, which is only available if you build ext/mysqli with mysqlnd support, does fetch all rows of a result set into an array with just one function call:

$all_rows = mysqli_fetch_all($res);

The one mysqli_fetch_all() call does exactly the same as the following loop:

Miha Nedok from http://www.izklop.com wrote us a few days ago about their mysqlnd test run:

I wish I had another production box to test. But what we and our users see now, actually the users notified our team that the site is suddenly “always loading fast”.. The only change… you guessed it mysqlnd installed. It wasn’t slow before, but people noticed performance degradation at times that the site is most visited when libmysql was used.

Hick-ups solved

After a little hick-up during the first days the server is now running stable with ext/mysql @ mysqlnd. Immediately after the installation of mysqlnd, Miha noticed that persistent connections got closed because of a low …

Miha Nedok from http://www.izklop.com wrote us a few days ago about their mysqlnd test run:

I wish I had another production box to test. But what we and our users see now, actually the users notified our team that the site is suddenly “always loading fast”.. The only change… you guessed it mysqlnd installed. It wasn’t slow before, but people noticed performance degradation at times that the site is most visited when libmysql was used.

Hick-ups solved

After a little hick-up during the first days the server is now running stable with ext/mysql @ mysqlnd. Immediately after the installation of mysqlnd, Miha noticed that persistent connections got closed because of a low …

You want to run the mysqlnd tests, because you never trust anybody else test results? In particular you are getting sceptical if anybody claims to have reached a certain level of stability? Read on, here’s a step-by-step for faking your own test results.

New tests …

PHP extensions can test their userland (PHP) functionality using so called “phpt Tests”. phpt Tests consist of several parts with their main part being regular PHP code to test PHP. On the website of the PHP Quality Assurance Team you can find a documentation of the phpt Tests syntax on the page Writing Tests, if your are interested in the details. Most extensions contain a tests/ subdirectory in the …

You want to run the mysqlnd tests, because you never trust anybody else test results? In particular you are getting sceptical if anybody claims to have reached a certain level of stability? Read on, here’s a step-by-step for faking your own test results.

New tests …

PHP extensions can test their userland (PHP) functionality using so called “phpt Tests”. phpt Tests consist of several parts with their main part being regular PHP code to test PHP. On the website of the PHP Quality Assurance Team you can find a documentation of the phpt Tests syntax on the page Writing Tests, if your are interested in the details. Most extensions contain a tests/ subdirectory in the …

A blog comment from Ian makes me wonder if I failed to state clearly what mysqlnd is. See below for his comment. Ian, I am thankful for your blog comment and question! Probably you are not the only reader who needs a little more background knowledge about mysqlnd. Please allow me to answer your question in public and in depth. FAQ: What is mysqlnd, do I need it?.

The acronym “mysqlnd” stands for “MySQL native driver for PHP”. This pretty much says nothing to most people, I guess.

• “native”: Is it written in PHP? No, that would be two slow. As you probably know, PHP itself is a program written in C. Therefore native means C and tightly integrated into PHP on the level of C. This is for sure a good thing as the driver can try to squeeze out the optimum of PHP. …

A blog comment from Ian makes me wonder if I failed to state clearly what mysqlnd is. See below for his comment. Ian, I am thankful for your blog comment and question! Probably you are not the only reader who needs a little more background knowledge about mysqlnd. Please allow me to answer your question in public and in depth. FAQ: What is mysqlnd, do I need it?.

The acronym “mysqlnd” stands for “MySQL native driver for PHP”. This pretty much says nothing to most people, I guess.

• “native”: Is it written in PHP? No, that would be two slow. As you probably know, PHP itself is a program written in C. Therefore native means C and tightly integrated into PHP on the level of C. This is for sure a good thing as the driver can try to squeeze out the optimum of PHP. …

Recently mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP, has been checked in to the PHP 6 (HEAD) development tree on cvs.php.net. This blog posting gives a quick overview how you can build PHP 5 and PHP 6 with mysqlnd support.

What mysqlnd is and what not

If you do not know what mysqlnd is or not is, read up the details on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/. In short: mysqlnd is is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. It it closely integrated into PHP and it is distributed under the terms of the PHP license. You can now …