alex.moskalyuk

Zack Urlocker, Vice President for Marketing at MySQL AB, wrote a post introducing new MySQL storage engines, NitroEDB and BrightHouse. What’s their claim to fame?

NitroEDB concentrates on dealing with large data sets: “NitroEDB is the only relational data management product that supports the full spectrum of data management needs, from extremely fast in-memory applications to huge-volume, very large database (VLDB) on-disk server systems.”

BrightHouse is also dealing with large data sets, but for a different problem - it solves the problems of data compression in large data warehousing projects: “BrightHouse compresses data at an average ratio of 10:1 (peak compression ratios exceed 30:1). For example, BrightHouse compresses 30 TB into 3 TB whilst maintaining immediate and comprehensive query capability. Additionally, BrightHouse operates on commodity-based Intel hardware thereby allowing installation on existing, low-cost platforms.”

Ever found yourself with too many PHP classes and not too much understanding of how they all tie together? PHP class graph generator parses your source code directory and produces the dependency graph. Here’s the bash source file from Jacob Westhoff.

Caching is easy if all you gotta cache are some static files that need to be served over and over, and they never change. Unfortunately, most of the sites on the Internet are not in the business of serving that kind of content, and allowing Apache to cache dynamic content is frequently a problem. O’Relly Network has an article on mod_cache:

If you run a reverse proxy server–if your Apache server sits in front of some other back-end server, proxying requests to it–mod_cache will cache the content retrieved from those back-end servers, as well as local content. This is the configuration that folks seem to be most familiar with. Indeed, caching is often most effective in this scenario. When you have a slower legacy back-end server producing some of your content, this setup is useful to give it a little more pep.

MSN AdCenter provides a credit of $100 when you sign up for an AdCenter account here and enter code DM-1-1106 on the final sign up screen.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is offering free $75 in credit via this link.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal reports from OOPSLA conference’s panel Objects and Databases: The State of the Union in 2006, where the participants talk on the status quo of the object database world. The statement from Bob Walker of Gemstone Systems is pretty interesting:

What we found since we’re already doing transparent access to objects without having to do anything other than to say “Wait or I want an egg” and the egg is still there. I think that problem has been solved in terms of OR mapping or impedance mismatch, I like your analogy, I think that is very good. I think the next step and from what I’m hearing from programmers, I hear things like “I just want my objects. I just want them here and I want them now and I don’t want to have to mess with it, I just want them there, I don’t want to have to deal with the database, I want all that stuff taken care of for me.” I think the next step, and I think we’re seeing this at Gemstone, is what basically is a distributed in-memory live object cache that has transactional attributes but it doesn’t deal with disk space storage what so ever. I think, five years from now, we are going to memory cheap enough and fast enough that there won’t be any discs. There will simply be in memory objects, ubiquitous throughout the enterprise, a robust sea of objects always available for the programmer. They don’t have to mess with OR mapping, they don’t have to mess with object databases, they don’t have to mess with SQL, the objects are just there ready for the taking and for the use.

There’s also an article in Dr. Dobb’s on an open source object database engine:

db4o, an open-source object database for embedded Java and .NET applications, is promising a significant performance and memory improvement in a new release.

Need to do a HTTP POST, but your PHP for whatever reason does not have access to Curl? Wez Furlong wrote a simple function that does HTTP POST via stream_context_create, which should work out to be faster than Curl-based HTTP POST, since stream functions do not have the overhead.

SiteTimer from OctaGate loads a URL you give it and tracks how many milliseconds it took to connect, request, load the first byte and load the last byte of every single element of your Web site. It produces a graph of all the components with their respective load times, which could be used for debugging the slow sites. One caveat though: it does not attempt to interpret the JavaScript, it simply records the time it took to load the script.

They also have a few pointers if you find your site on a slow side of their graphs:

* Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
* Use harder compression on your jpg images
* Make the images smaller in size
* Reduce the number of images
* Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

ZDNet is reporting on a $99 laptop offered by Circuit City the day after Thanksgiving. The catch? One has to sign up for Vonage, which could offset the price by $300 for a $25 plan in 12 months. The same laptop without Vonage subscription will sell for $299.

Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress/Automattic fame is reporting from MySQLCamp talk by Google engineers. The basic ideas behind Google’s use of MySQL for replication are

• using the cheapest hardware possible
• replicating entire databases at a time
• use DNS for load-balancing DB servers
• automated way to bring up a brand new slave
• track the most expensive query

There’s also a talk by Jeff Dean given at the University of Washington last year regarding Google’s BigTable - distributed hash project.

Aaron Wormus put up the slides for his presentations on PHP:
* Moving to PHP5 with Style
* Planning a PHP4 -> PHP5 platform Rewrite
* Advanced PHP Tools (tutorial)
All .zip files.