MySQL is one of the most popular databases out there with the Open Source community, but there are so many features and so many ways to configure it, that sometimes it can get a little bit overwhelming. Well, this article from the O'Reilly Network provides ten of the "best practices" that the average user really should follow to keep their MySQL running correctly and safely. There's tips like: "Don't store binary data in MySQL" and "Tune your queries with EXPLAIN SELECT". This last one's a pretty cool feature really. It allows you to see how your SELECT query is referenceing the tables and help you place indexes in your database.

Also today, we have a few new things from Zend.com this morning. First, they have posted the latest PHP Weekly Summmary for this past week (thanks geoff). There's a few interesting things in this one, including the new PHP Meetup Site that halps you find other PHP developers in your area to meet up with them. Another interesting note is that the PHP team is looking for an OSX tester to act as a quality assurance tester for the PHP releases. If you're interested, contact Marko via the lists.
And, also from Zend today - there's a new addition to their Publisher's Corner - the book XML and PHP. I think I just might have to go and pick this one up. It covers all sorts of issues and situations of using PHP to parse, create and correctly format XML for your applications. It goes through SAX, DOM, XSLT, WDDX, RPC, and concludes with a few case studies of real world projects that use XML on a daily basis.

One thing that many people don't consider when they're working on a project is the name that they want to call it. Most of the time, I've just shortened the name of the company the work is for or just used part of their name for it, but this article from Builder.com tells about one developer's story with creating his own project name for something. He got lucky and his tounge-in-cheek acronym worked so well that the management adopted it internally to refer to that application. I can think of several other stories of people that have gotten in trouble with their bosses for calling something by a different name, especially when clients are around. It's one thing to joke with your coworkers, but another to joke with the client.