A while back I announced on the PDO mailinglist that I would review the tests the mysqlnd team wrote. These tests are currently MySQL specific and I was hoping that we could adopt them for the other drivers. I spend less time than I originally envisioned on the review, mostly because the last 2 months were a bit more exhausting at work than I had anticipated. So I ended up sleeping more and working less. Anyways, at this point it seems to me like the tests themselves are too MySQL specific to be easily portable to other RDBMS and that the time is therefore better spend simply writing new tests and using the mysqlnd tests as inspiration. However, I feel like the current structure of the test suite is not optimal yet, though I might not fully grasp the current approach.

More and more people are lending advice to the MySQL guys at Sun (not even mentioning the level of fact based slapping its getting along the way). I think there is one important thing missing in this advice, Sun has its feet in 3 RDBMS products: MySQL, Drizzle and PostgreSQL. Even if they paid a 1B USD for the first, the other two are important to remember as well. Actually Drizzle is mentioned a lot in this advice, but PostgreSQL is oddly absent. IMHO MySQL serves a market quite perfectly at this point and I do not see this changing in the next few years.

Since I recently stumbled over issues with persistent connections I got reminded once again about SQL Relay. Not really a solution to my problems, since SQL Relay will not magically clean up open transactions (or does it?). However it would help reduce the number of open connections while still getting rid of most the connection overhead. Then again at peak times it might not reduce the number of connections all that much and at low traffic times I guess the main benefit is that one can have more spare children hanging around without clogging up the DB with lots of open connections.

Well it really wasn't my intention, but I was aware of the risk when I prepared this talk at Forum PHP in Paris. I held the closing session where I talked about what I have learned while trying to document and eventually becoming part of the "PHP development process". The gist is essentially that there is not much of a formal process or any single person/entity that is controlling things. It all works based on trust, mostly implied rules/guidelines .. although increasingly the implied stuff is getting documented. Sounds scary? Well it sounds quite reassuring to some and scary to others.

Hoping someone can explain to me what is going on here. We are connecting to SQL Server via mssql_pconnect(). MaxChilds is set to 256 and we are only establishing one connection per request. So as a result I am expecting a maximum of 256 established connections. A client went into production yesterday and due to a missing index the server ended up being insanely loaded, as the queries started to block each other. The sysadmin checked the state of things via netstat and found that there were close to 500 tcp connections to the SQL Server. What gives?