Daniel Jensen has a new post about using Gearman to do some simple database inserts asynchronously.

If you need to do a lot of inserts in your DB with a certain line of order they should be carried out in or with a clean-up script following after the inserts and you don't have to wait for a reply from MySQL, the answer to that problem might be this worker written in PHP for Gearman as an interface for your DB. A MySQL crash or a worker crash will have no impact on your inserts because they will just stay in the Gearman queue until the system is running again.

He includes a code snippet showing a sample database Gearman worker written in PHP to run simple database queries. His example uses a simple database connection (a basic wrapper around a mysql_query) and the line of code to run the worker.