Category: Programming

Good start: don’t use it unless you need to, there’s plenty of alternatives, e.g. DOMXML, str_replace, etc. Also PHP5+ has lots of filters for email validation and URL validation etc, function calls you can make rather than complex regular expressions. Regular expressions can slow down quickly due to back tracking, pattern complexity and long strings. … Read More “Regex-fu #PHPUK2010” »

Just picked up a nice tid-bit on creating a unique index on a two column table where the values in each column may be either way around but you only ever want one instance of the value in that row. So what this means is, inserting 2,1 and 1,2 for example would result in only … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 2 (MySQL stuff)” »

Josh began by using the dictionary definition of simplicity (as given by Wikipedia) pointing out that the word is often used as a derogatory statement. He then went onto “clarity of expression” and that striving for it while programming is something a lot of people do but never quite seem to achieve. He spoke of … Read More “#PHPUK2010 Part 1” »

I recently posted an article about using BINARY(16) for storing MD5’s as unique identifiers instead of simple integer ID’s (usually auto increment); in that article I touched on one of the benefits, reducing JOIN’s, but there are other reasons for doing it too, so I thought I’d post an article discussing purely the reasons behind … Read More “MySQL and Binary(16) – The Reasons/Benefits/Drawbacks (#mysql)” »

Over the past few months at work, we’ve seen our database grown from silly big to really silly big, it’s still a way to go to get to the size of the big boys such as Facebook etc. but it’s still a database stored in MySQL that most day-to-day PHP programmers would avoid like a … Read More “MySQL – Binary(16) and scalability” »