This includes the end of support for all things PHP 4 as noted by seemingly everybody on php planet. But I also wanted to reminds people that the same is more or less happening in the MySQL world too. Did you know that active support for MySQL 4.x ended along with the year 2006? Did you even know that MySQL 5.0 active support is ending this year!?! Given MySQL 5.1 no show mentality, they might have to review this. Well there is of course extended support that extends MySQL 4.0 support until this year, MySQL 4.1 until the end of next year and MySQl 5.0 until the end of 2011.

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.