A new submission was sent in from Filip de Waard today about an article on his site that talks about creating SQLite in-memory databases.

For the last few months both developers and reviewers have been going crazy about the improvements and new features in PHP 5. One of these new features is a fast and efficient database extension called SQLite. In this article we will take a closer look at one of its lesser known features: in-memory databases.

Creating a normal SQLite database is simple, but the "in-memory" portion of the idea makes things a bit more difficult. They only run as long as the process runs, getting dropped as soon as the script ends. Thus, you only really need to use this method if you're dealing with data you can afford to loose.

So what use do SQLite in-memory tables have in PHP? Well, you could use them for training or testing purposes and for temporary tables. The fact that the database gets dropped after the script is executed makes it impossible to use them for most normal purposes.