Igor is doing great work on moving forward the XML based database schema format originally developed by Manuel Lemos as part of Metabase that is used in MDB2_Schema. The idea is to add the ability to also handle UPDATE and DELETE statement next to the currently supported CREATE, DROP, ALTER and INSERT statements. This format is even supported by DBDesigner4 and the DatabaseSchema ez component. For the uninitiated if you: The idea behind this schema format is to make it possible to define a single database schema that can be used to create, alter and initialize databases in any number of RDBMS. For example currently MDB2_Schema supports MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Interbase/Firebird.

On the education front things are moving forward nicely. I now have confirmation that the only thing that stands between me and a degree in computer sciene is finishing my thesis paper. The paper itself is already well under way. I have all the literature research done and I have written the first 2 chapters and I am fairly far with the third chapter. I just send out a ton of email interviews. The general topic is open source in the relational database market. I will publish the paper on this site once I am done.

I have begun work on the next set of features for MDB2. I just implemented a feature inspired by the popular ADODB abstraction layer. John calls it smart transactions, while I am currently planning on calling it nested transactions. However I will wait until Lorenzo has some time to look at things to see if we can fit native nested transactions in there or not. Interbase/Firedbird really shines in this department.

Well there is a lot of back and forth about if PEAR should mandate PEAR_Error or PEAR_Exceptions or neither for new packages. This also relates to the question of PHP5 E_STRICT compliance which PEAR_Error obviously is not.

I decided to go with a bump of the minor version for the next release of MDB2 because there are a number significant changes and additions. One of the big changes is dropping array_key_exists() whereever possible. I kind of got bitten by isset() in the past a lot. Just stupid little mistakes. However I somehow felt more confident with replacing things with empty() calls. The same change was made across all drivers which were released as 1.1.0 versions (except for the Frontbase driver that needs a maintainer and the beta drivers for Oracle and Querysim).