A lot of you out there, I imagine, are in the same situation that I'm in here at work - you love the speed and ability of MySQL, but you need to use Oracle when it comes to the "real apps" for the company. Well, PHPEverywhere has something for you - they have posted today a new article, Flying with Oracle and MySQL: Benchmarking Performance. He gives all the details on his testing, including the types of systems that he tested one or the other on and the SQL/PHP code that he used (so that you can go back and reproduce it all if you'd like). Guess who came out on top (as far as speed)....No big surprises here.

Zend also has a new article posted this morning - a new tutorial that talks about "Encryption and Decryption using PHP and GnuPG". For those that don't know, GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is a RFC2440 (OpenPGP) compliant application. Since it's a command-line utility, it provides some interesting challenges as far as getting the data to and from it. In this article they focus mainly on encrypting your files with this software - and one of the nice other things is that you can decrypt the files also (not just one way, like some other PHP methods).

Now, when I first started programming PHP, there were two things that completely baffled me - classes and regular expressions. I'd done some Perl, so I knew what regexps were, but not how to use/abouse them and bend them to my will. I've only reciently gotten pretty good with them, but I really could have used more articles like <A href=http://evolt.org/article/Regular_Expression_Basics/20/22700/index.html">this one on Evolt.org. "Regular Expression Basics" gives you a great overview of all of the meta-characters and cool little tricks you can do with regexps (including backreferences). They even give you three simple examples that will help you understand some of the more practical uses for these amazingly powerful programming tools.