Avid readers of my blog know that I have been pondering how to best approach schema evolution. I ported the schema management from Metabase to PEAR::MDB2_Schema. I even gave a talk that admittedly only did a good job of defining the problem and solutions that all suffered from severe limitations. Now for the first time I am starting to feel somewhat good about an approach to migrations. I wrote a post to the Doctrine developers mailinglist detailing the key pieces that I want to add to Doctrine's migrations. The idea is to use the migrations approach made popular by Ruby on Rails but improve this concept with several key additions.

We have taken over an application which had "pretend" failover. Essentially it had two servers with automatic failover between the two. However they both relied on another server for providing the data storage via NFS all the way down to the MySQL server. Interesting how one can manage to provide no real failover with 3 servers. Obviously we want to fix this and actually a number of servers have already been bought. So now we have moved the MySQL server with a cold standby on separate machines. We also have 3 frontend servers which we want to load balance. We will probably use memcache to manage the sessions, as we are not so worried about a lost session when a crash occurs. But now comes the problem: There are a lot of places where administrators and end users can upload files, which end up in the file system. Now how do we replicate those files across all the nodes?

So I have decided I need a few more babies after putting my first OSS baby aka MDB2 to rest. Speaking of rest .. one of my new babies will be reSTed from the very beginning. The goal is to convert all of the various README type files in cvs.php.net into the reST format. This will enable us to render them to html and docbook while still keeping them plain text readable. For now I have used the Horde Text_reST package, which doesn't do everything one would hope for (I am having some issues with lists and there is also no docbook renderer). Hopefully the folks at eZ will come through with a fancy new parser/renderer one of these days. At least Derick said its on their agenda.

Je suis désolé que mon français est trés mauvais. But I am very eager to change this. So some day the previous sentence will actually be somewhat grammatically correct. I am not really aiming for written perfection, but I want to be able to hold a decent casual conversation in French without forcing the other person to switch to German or English all the time. I decided this a few weeks ago. However now I have been accepted to speak in Montreal at the mostly French speaking PHP Quebec conference!

Sorry for the delay. I still do not have SSL on my blog and I it took me a while to figure out how to properly tunnel my browser through ssh. Now that I have it setup (or all the sniffers can now use my blog) here is the link to the slides. The goal of the talk was to provide some hints on good and bad ideas. More importantly I wanted to illustrate that you can do a lot of stuff in SQL, that most people think can only be done inside their middle tier language.