Brian was kind enough to review both of his presentations which go in to great detail about the scaling issues he's faced both with DealNews.com and the Phorum forum software project (which recently turned 10 years old!) [...] Thanks to Brian for going over things in such detail!

You can download this latest episode from the WebDevRadio site as well as check out Brian's slides from his MySQL conference presentation.

One key thing he's repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously. His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering when it comes back.

They've published a PEAR package as an example of this asynchronous method that interfaces with Digg's API (http://services.digg.com). You can read more about the subject of his talk on the MySQL Conference website.

The post explains what each of the technologies are for and where they fit in most development. The PDO_MYSQLND functionality is a direct connection for the PDO libraries to connect to MySQL using the native driver.

PDO_MYSQLND inherits all benefits of the MySQL native driver for PHP. In addition to the shared advantages you get the first PDO driver for MySQL developed by Sun/MySQL!