Yesterday I pushed out several MDB2 releases. I am hoping that the Firebird/Interbase and the MS SQL Server drivers will follow soon, once the relevant maintainers have completed testing. This was mostly a bug fix release cycle, though the changelogs ended up being suprisingly long. The biggest, or maybe craziest, feature addition was done to the SQLite driver. I got annoyed be seeing the driver fail so many of the unit tests because there is no support for ALTER TABLE in SQLite version 2 that I sat down and wrote up an emulation for it. Maybe someone has use for it. There is a lot of tricky code in there to properly read the current table layout like fields, indexes and constraints as well as the data which all should be merged with the changes if everything goes as planned. Needless to say its a somewhat risky operation, especially since SQLite does not support transactions for DDL operaitons.

Things are moving along nicely with the 2 Google SoC projects I am mentoring. Igor is already fairly far along on his project that will add of DML support into MDB2_Schema. If you grab CVS there is a little demo script. Igar has also fixed several issues in the DTD and added an XML Schema xsd that supports much more detailed validation. The main thing Igor will hopefully get time to improve is the API for the new validation class. This should make it much easier to write new parsers or validate existing array database definition structures.

I have been asking for this for a long time and the text has been sitting in my wiki for almost as long, but I was waiting for an official blessing from internals. In the end I just went ahead and wrote up some patches for phpdoc, Sean and Nuno were kind enough to review and commit them. So now we finally have some guidelines on how users should name their identifiers to be fairly future proof. This should hopefully help reduce the amount of pain people suffer when PHP adds new features like a class for Date or File handling. Although the two mentioned examples have settled on using DateTime and FileObject to get around the issue at least partially.

Parallel with last years international PHP conference the folks at S&S organized a novelty: an open source database conference. It was a great success. We had people from most projects for end users to talk to: PostgreSQL, BerkleyDB, MySQL, SQLite, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, Firebird and MaxDB. I hope this year Ingres will also make it and maybe a few others I do not even know yet! For the projects themselves it was a great opportunity to sit down and discuss about the potential for cooperation. The conference will be held again, same time same place. So mark your calendar November 6th-8th opendbcon 2006 in Frankfurt germany.

I fixed a serious BC issue that I introduced in the last releases of the MySQL drivers, that would cause issues with servers that do not support InnoDB. I switched to forcing the InnoDB table handler. The fix is to simply not force any table handler and use the server default. There were also some minor bug fixes in several of the other drivers. More importantly however I am pretty happy with the nested transaction API as well as improvements to the debug callback mechanism.