Here’s a MySQL tip from the MySQL Performance Blog which deals with possible lock situations while using InnoDB and foreign keys. Today I was working with application which uses Innodb and foreign keys and got into...

Most of us have had problems with UTF-8 problems in PHP and MySQL. Here’s how to modify your database and table to be UTF-8 compliant. Most of the time we do set the character set to utf8 but forget to set the collatio...

Did you know what the suffix in the MySQL collations are? For example what’s the difference between ascii_bin and ascii_general_ci ? *_bin: represents binary case sensitive collation *_cs: case sensitive collation ...

EnterpriseDB is an open source database system which allows you to port most Oracle applications over to their database server with almost no change to your code. They allow you to use the database free of cost, while p...

GROUP_CONCAT(expr) - This function returns a string result with the concatenated non-NULL values from a group. Where it can be useful? For example to get PHP array without looping inside PHP: CREATE TABLE services ( id I...

An interesting read from Peter Zaitsev about optimizing MySQL queries which use ORDER BY with LIMIT. Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. He...

Here’s an interesting article showing benchmarks between the various libraries used to query MySQL databases. It looks like the mysql and mysqli libraries work much faster than PDO. Extension Req/Sec mysqli 16...

IBM has an interesting article which outlines some common database problems which PHP programmers encounter. “Discover five common database problems that occur in PHP applications — including database schema...

Did you know that you can activate a MySQL to log all queries which take a long time to run? You can use this log to identify queries which may not be optimal and could be bringing down your web application peformance. H...

Here’s an interesting installer called from Bitrock, which allows you to create installers for your application on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and FreeBSD. The installer also has a LAMP stack which ...