I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I am very glad to hear that Brian's vision for Drizzle seems to be quite pluggable. This hits home perfectly with my hopes .. well for Drizzle to be pluggable! While I have not had the time to install and play with Drizzle I did stumble over the list of what has been dropped from MySQL so far. I am not sure how complete this list is (for example VIEW's are not listed as having been removed, but it was said that they would be removed), but I assume that nothing on the list is on there falsely. So some brief observations:

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less. As a result developers will now need to get explicit consent from Johannes and myself if they want to add new features. We have already given a number of changes our blessing between alpha1 and alpha2, which are for the most part changes that are very self contained areas (mostly inside existing extensions). There are also a few changes that we still hope to be committed this weekend. At any rate expect alpha1 to be released around July 31st.

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The timing of my last post is quite a coincidence. Here I write that the only feature out of the big 5.0 bunch I use is VIEWs and I did not really come out to say that its a must have. Actually with an ORM like Doctrine I can get more or less the same effect (then again in at least one case the point of the VIEW was to present external applications with a time dependent view of the data). So when Drizzle was announced with a cut down feature set I did not dread a single second. Actually I have been collecting articles in order to ready yet another plea to the MySQL folks to open up the development process. So all I can say is: Awesome! Welcome back in the open source world MySQL or shall I say Drizzle?