So the other day I stumbled over the slides of the InnoDB talk at this years MySQL users conf and I noticed "gap locking" somewhere in the middle. I have never heard of "gap locking" so I was quite intrigued by what that might be. From what I understand its InnoDB's solution to implementing REPEATABLE READ (though until MySQL 5.1 it seems this feature is also enabled for READ COMMITTED). I guess its a fairly unique approach and from my current understanding to be feasible it expects short running transactions, which luckily are quite common in web applications that most of us care about.

Ok, here would have been a thing on how I decided to reuse Wez's PDO slides in the spirit of "code-reuse". There would also be a section on the fact that I added a bit of fluff on why bother with abstraction and how PDO fits into the grand world of abstraction and what layers exist on top of PDO. And that I held this talk at the Dutch PHP Conference, which had to turn down 150 people who wanted to come, because they couldn't get bigger rooms, but that the 250-300 people that did attend seemed to have a good time listening to a mix of talks in Dutch and English.

.. and more annoyingly, why I spend the night in Amsterdam, even though the Dutch PHP conference is not until next weekend. So there were apparently some pretty bad thunderstorms over France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As a result the plane that should take me to Amsterdam on the way to Sandjeford arrived about an hour late. Back in the day, when airlines still afforded themselves some ground time, this would not have been that big a deal, as I had no checked luggage and so ideally I could have switched planes in time as I had 1 hour stopover time in Amsterdam. Well these days it means that if the incoming plane comes one hour late, you will likely also be one hour late. Usually they can try to make up a few minutes by burning some more fuel. In this case the thunderstorms actually forced us to fly a non standard route, which took even longer.

The observant reader of the internals PHP mailinglist might have noticed me crying about the lack of support for getting associative arrays instead of stdClass from ext/soap, which in turn causes issues with caching soap replies into APC.

I have some warm up questions on how MySQL handles LOBs internally and then some questions on high availability. Especially with HA I feel like I have heard all/most the solutions, but they all seem to lack in one area that really makes you hurt, but I keep stumbling over questions from people asking me which way to go. Finally I have a little backup question for extra credit at the end.