Sebastian Bergmann

Once again I spent a week in the San Francisco Bay Area. This time around it was for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

I flew in on April 12 (from FRA via LAX to SJC) and arrived in the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in the afternoon.

The next morning I left the hotel around 7:00 in the morning for a genuine experience of what they call public transportation in the bay area. It took me three hours to travel the distance of about 40 miles from Santa Clara to downtown San Francisco:

• Santa Clara VTA Light Rail from Santa Clara to Mountain View
• Caltrain from Mountain View to Millbrae
• BART from Millbrae to Powell Street

The most frustrating part of this experience was the fact that you buy separate tickets for each leg of the trip as the trains are operated by different carriers and that there is no integrated timetable online.

At LugRadio Live USA 2008 I attended the following sessions:

• Christian Hammond on Review Board
• Allison Randal on Parrot
• Matthew Walster on the demoscene

I also got to talk briefly to Jono Bacon and Allison Randal before I had to start the three hour trip back to Santa Clara.

I got back to Santa Clara in time for the MySQL Community Dinner that was initated by Arjen Lentz.

Unlike with the PHP-focussed conferences that I usually present at, I managed to attend a session in almost every timeslot (each of which had 8 sessions to choose from) at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

• Monday
  • MySQL Proxy: The Complete Tutorial
• Tuesday
  • State of MySQL
  • Open Source: The Heart of the Network Economy
  • The Lost Art of the Self Join
  • InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features
  • Investigating InnoDB Scalability Limits
• Wednesday
  • Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
  • Scaling MySQL - Up or Out?
  • MySQL Sandbox
  • Falcon from the Beginning
  • Architecture of Maria
  • Extending MySQL
• Thursday
  • Who is the Dick on my site?
  • The Social Graph and the Database
  • Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth
  • Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks
  • Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP

I had a great time at the conference. I met a lot of nice people, had plenty of interesting discussions, and I learned a lot in the sessions.

Here is the presentation material I used for my "Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit" presentation at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA today.

A PDF version of the presentation is available here, notes by Joe Stump (Digg.com) are here. Thanks to Sheeri Kritzer Cabral there is a video of the presentation.

And not just a data charmer:

"Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergmann to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of this session you will wonder how could you have survived for years without unit testing.
PHP programmers, mark your calendars!"

My presentation on PHPUnit is his reason #3 to attend this year's MySQL Conference next month in Santa Clara, CA.

See you in Santa Clara, Giuseppe!

When testing PHP code that uses PDO to connect to a database, it makes sense to keep your SQL compatible with SQLite. The fact that no inter-process communication with a server takes place (as there is no SQLite server) and SQLite's ability to store databases in memory minimizes the overhead incurred by the database.

	User	System	CPU	Total
PDO / MySQL	3.95s	0.87s	40%	12.046s
PDO / SQLite (file)	5.01s	1.54s	63%	10.359s
PDO / SQLite (memory)	3.16s	0.68s	99%	3.849s

The benchmark data above has been collected by running 200 test cases that all perform CREATE TABLE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT, and DROP TABLE queries against mysql://test@localhost/test, sqlite:///tmp/db, and sqlite://:memory: databases, respectively.

I will present a session on Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 that is held April 14-17 2008 in Santa Clara, CA, US.

Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit
In the last decade, PHP has developed from a niche language for adding dynamic functionality to small websites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale Web systems. Critical business logic like this needs to work correctly. But how do you ensure that it does? You test it, of course.

To make code testing viable, good tool support is needed. This is where PHPUnit comes into play. It is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

This session introduces the audience to PHPUnit’s DbUnit extension that makes the writing of tests that interact with databases more convenient and easier.

I am looking forward to attending this conference, catching up with the recent improvements to MySQL, and meeting with my friends from the MySQL community.

Some of the bloggers on Planet MySQL are sharing their proposals for the upcoming 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo. Hereby, I follow their example and give you mine.

The first proposal I submitted is on PHPUnit and will showcase Michael Lively Jr.'s port of DbUnit:

Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit

In the last decade, PHP has developed from a niche language for adding dynamic functionality to small websites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale Web systems. Critical business logic like this needs to work correctly. But how do you ensure that it does? You test it, of course.

To make code testing viable, good tool support is needed. This is where PHPUnit comes into play. It is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

This session introduces the audience to PHPUnit's DbUnit extension that makes the writing of tests that interact with databases more convenient and easier.

The scond proposal takes a piece of code for data partitioning that I wrote a long time ago for phpOpenTracker and relates it to MySQL 5.1's native support for this concept:

(Custom) Data Partitioning - Then & Now

Partitioning allows you to distribute portions of individual tables across a filesystem according to rules which you can set largely as needed. In effect, different portions of a table are stored as separate tables in different locations.

Some queries can be greatly optimized in virtue of the fact that data satisfying a given WHERE clause can be stored only on one or more partitions, thereby excluding any remaining partitions from the search.

Starting with version 5.1, MySQL natively supports partitioning. But partioning can even be implemented with older versions using MyISAM Merge Tables and custom application logic. This session will first present a small PHP library that rewrites SQL queries to a merge table to use as few individual tables as possible before it will give an overview of MySQL 5.1's native partioning implementation.

If you are interested in these topics, share your opinion in the comments. Thanks!