This is a PHP tutorial for the PostgreSQL database. It covers the basics of PostgreSQL programming with PHP. The examples were created and tested on Linux. [...] PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It is a multi-user, multi-threaded database management system. It runs on multiple platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. PostgreSQL is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.

The chapters guide you through every step you'll need:

• An introduction to PostgreSQL and getting it and PHP support installed (with the php5-pgsql package)
• Example code showing how to extract data from your tables
• Working with images and storing their data in a table
• Pulling out the metadata from the database, things like number of rows returned and table information
• Transactions and database-side processing

Now with OEM finding what the query is is really easy (you might need to buy Oracle Performance pack to monitor vitals and performance information). So you know which query caused the spike. Do you know where that query is in your application code? [...] You already have a ton of applications written, having to go through every query to add this meta information is a ton of dev effort. What do you do?

He's found a way to help solve the problem - you can use a few handy functions to let you set some more information about the connection. These settings can give you more information about the client, a client identifier, module information and what action or function is performing the query. This information can then be queried in via the V$session variable on the server side.

It's just that every time I sit down to have a go at [finding something in my photo or mp3 library], the sheer volume of data overwhelms me and I take the command decision to deal with something easier instead. Sounds familiar? If it does, help is at hand, in the form of PHP's ID3 and EXIF extensions. These extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it's easier to navigate and search. Keep reading, and I'll show you how.

He installs the ID3 package first (via the pecl command line tool) and gives a few sample scripts to pull the metadata information out of a mp3 file as well as update/remove the information that's already there. He even sets up a simple SQLite database to store the information he's retrieved.

The second part of the tutorial looks at grabbing the image metadata via the EXIF extension. This can yield all sorts of information including date/time the photo was taken, the resolution, the model of the camera and various camera settings at the time. He includes a sample script that automatically makes thumbnails for the images via the exif_thumbnail function.

Picking up from where we left off last week, we'll be discussing shortcuts, query responses, metadata, and more.

They start off looking at shortcuts, those handy things the PEAR DB package offers to make life simpler (like getRow and getAssoc) before moving on to how to get the details about the response itself (like affectedRows and tableInfo). Next up is working with the metadata (using getListOf) and, finally, a sample application to tie them all together.