Sometimes you need to work with big numbers in PHP (gulp). For example, sometimes 32-bit identifiers are not enough and you have to use BIGINT 64-bit ids; e.g. if you are encoding additional information like the server ID into high bits of the ID. I had already written about the mess that 64-bit integers are [...]
Integers in PHP, running with scissors, and portability
Until recently I thought that currently popular scripting languages, which mostly evolved over last 10 years or something, must allow for easier portability across different platforms compared to ye good olde C/C++. After all, their development started a few decades after C, so its notorious caveats are all well-known and should be easy to avoid [...]
Cache Performance Comparison
Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]
Handling big result sets
Sometime it is needed to handle a lot of rows on client side. Usual way is send query via mysql_query and than handle the result in loop mysql_fetch_array (here I use PHP functions but they are common or similar for all APIs, including C). Consider table:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 | CREATE TABLE `longf` ( `f1` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `f2` date default NULL, `f3` date default NULL, `f4` varchar(14) default NULL, `f5` varchar(6) default NULL, `f6` date default NULL, `f7` smallint(6) default NULL, `f8` smallint(6) default NULL, `f9` varchar(13) default NULL, `f10` varchar(39) default NULL, `f11` int(11) default NULL, `f12` float default NULL, `f13` int(11) default NULL, `f14` smallint(6) default NULL, `f15` varchar(39) default NULL, `f16` date default NULL, `f17` smallint(6) default NULL, `f18` int(11) NOT NULL, `f19` date default NULL, `f20` date default NULL, `f21` varchar(14) default NULL, `f22` varchar(6) default NULL, `f23` date default NULL, `f24` smallint(6) default NULL, `f25` smallint(6) default NULL, `f26` varchar(13) default NULL, `f27` varchar(39) default NULL, `f28` int(11) default NULL, `f29` float default NULL, `f30` int(11) default NULL, `f31` smallint(6) default NULL, `f32` varchar(39) default NULL, `f33` date default NULL, `f34` smallint(6) default NULL, `f35` int(11) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`f1`) ); select count(*) from longf; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 5242880 | +----------+ |

