Migrating user account databases

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As a part of my work at The Group, I’ve been developing a suite of applications for them. As most web applications do, these applications have to store their user data somewhere – in a database. As you may guess, the user’s password has been stored as a hash. As a part of some new developments, we are moving our …

Understanding Doctrine’s NestedSet feature

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The Doctrine library comes with a feature called nested set, which makes saving trees in a database easy. However, it’s quite easy to accidentally cause a lot of extra unneeded queries if not being careful. Here are some pointers to keep in mind while working with the nested set, and some example queries to make understanding it easier.

PHP with Microsoft IIS and Microsoft SQL server

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You often hear that using PHP under Microsoft servers is a bad idea, because it doesn’t work very well. But is that even true? You guessed it… no. It is actually possible to get a PHP based database application working under IIS and MS SQL Server perfectly fine, it just may take some configuration. You can even get Apache mod_rewrite …

Setting up Windows as a PHP development server

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Install a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment in 4 easy steps, one of which is optional and one of which isn’t really a step at all! ;) These days I’ve been working on Linux servers for a long time, so when I had to install all the things necessary for PHP development on Windows, I realized it isn’t necessarily …

Are DB layers like Zend_Db making people forget SQL?

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While possibly a great help and a way to speed development up, are database access classes like Zend_Db and others making people forget about SQL? ActiveRecord, Table Row Gateway and whatnot, are people trying to constrain their thinking inside the bounds given by these implementations?