As I was sitting for hours on the bus somewhere between Maceio and Receife on my trip to Brazil, waiting for the the bus to reach the other side of the road blockade that was setup in protest by local sugar cane farmers, a thought began to materialize in my head: We really should have an advocacy group around PHP! The first code name was found in that very first traint of thought: emPHPower!

I have been quite vocal at every opportunity about how surrogate keys suck. However I must admit, as vocal as I may be, I have not really been good at working towards not using them myself. So briefly what are surrogate keys? They are usually those meaningless integer identifiers you see everywhere. Yes like in the url to this very blog post. People have come to love them however, especially people that use tools to generate SQL for them. But general wisdom tells people that everything is faster with integers. I keep hearing the same story over and over from self proclaimed MySQL, PostgreSQL or whatever kind of RDBMS they are flying experts. Index reads, joins and of course development since most tools are optimized (or should we rather say oversimplified things) towards integer surrogate keys. Now I keep repeating the same complaints, that surrogate keys are usually not faster in any meaningful way, that they sometimes can actually be slower due to unnecessary joins and that they are meaningless to end users and developers alike (always fun when trying to read log files of queries full of surrogate keys).

Well actually the TestFest has already been announced at the PHP London and PHP Quebec conferences. Since this is something we have never done in this form, I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

The slides for my talk at PHP Quebec 08 are available in the slides section. Overall I am only semi happy with my talk. I defiantly need to add more visualization to the slides. I also need to probably kick out some more concepts and provide more detail on others. My original lofty goal for this talk is to mainly focus on introducing people to concepts that they might not be aware of and more importantly give them the key words (and some links) so that they can then teach themselves the details if they need them. But I think people prefer to get less topics but those topics in detail. I am also somewhat worried that given the fact that I glossed over details, there were so little questions after the talk or in the hall ways since. I got ok ratings for the talk, so I guess the talk did provide some value to people. Aside from this we are also having some really good discussions among the internals people here. Expect some interesting announcements and blog posts soon!

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. I made things look a bit more like an official php.net site with my limited html/css skills (ok actually I just did cut and paste from the main page) and added authentication against said master.php.net auth interface.