The latest episode of the /Dev/Hell podcast has been released - Episode 27, "Artisan Database Administration":

This episode marks a return, both for special guest Selena Deckelmann, and our special hand-made artisan podcasting. Know that this episode was made with locally-sourced bytes, harvested with care and respect for the Earth. We talk with Selena about working at Mozilla, her switch to Linux on the desktop, and how marketing is weightier than merit in determining a product's success.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 of the recording. If you like what you hear, consider subscribing to their feed for more great episodes.

Jay Allen has found what he calls the world's smallest MySQL admin script and has posted about it to his CodingThis.com blog - Adminer.

I've spent years using phpMyAdmin (much to my chagrin). And I've recently warmed up to MySQL Workbench. But it wasn't until this week that I stumbled across Adminer, a single-file PHP application for MySQL administration. It's hard not to be impressed by Adminer, which is both devilishly simple and elegantly designed. The file downloads as adminer-2.3.2.php; save it as index.php in a folder named adminer, then navigate to http://servername.com/adminer/. Supply the name of your MySQL server (adding a colon if it's hosted on a non-standard port), your username, and password, and you're off!

He includes a few screenshots of the interface to create tables and manage them. If you've used the phpMyAdmin interface, you'll find a lot of things that are familiar in Adminer. If you're interesting in grabbing the latest source, you can pull it from SourceForge.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted the third part of their series looking at the Agavi framework and introducing you to come of the core concepts of its use. This part looks specifically at adding authentication/administration functionality to the sample application they've been building.

Over the next few sections, I'll help you make the Web Automobile Sales Platform (WASP) example application even smarter, as you add the ability for users to create, edit and delete records through a Web interface. I'll also discuss the basics of Agavi's security framework, and show you how to restrict certain functions to authenticated users only.

He includes to code to set up the new actions, templates and views as well as including a look at validators, database interaction and how to wrap it all in a simple user authentication script.

WebReference.com finishes off their series looking at user personalization with this new tutorial focusing on the administrative section of their example site.

Administration of an application is necessary because any website or application that involves users becomes bloated and very slow. This can be because many users have stopped using the application without removing some of the information that they were using. As a result, a lot of redundant data is left in the system that causes it to become slow. For this reason, we need to have a section in the application that will do the 'clean up' of redundant data or 'house keeping'.

The administration script allows an admin to look at the bookmarks in each user's account and remove any that are older, duplicate or might not be needed anymore. The admin section also allows a current admin to promote a current user up to the admin level too.

Padraic Brady is on part five of his series looking at making a blogging tool with the Zend Framework today. This time he focuses on the database side of things, working with models and making an admin module.

First of all I decided to add an Entries Model and Authors Model to the mix, primarily to get ready for when we can add new entries to our blog. This leads to where we can create new Entries; we add an Administration Module to the application with it's own distinct Layout.

He starts by making the database schema, an entries and authors table, before starting in on the models. They're made based off of the Zend_Db component's structure and they let the application interact with the data in the tables easily. His code for the modules is included as well as the controller and view for the admin module.

A little while back Matthew Turland posted an interesting item to has blog talking about what he calls the "odd triangle" of PHP, MySQL and Oracle.

In [an article from Maggie Nelson in a blog entry], she remarks on the article being MySQL-oriented and how limited MySQL explain plan support is compared to Oracle. I've had some thoughts in my head for a while that are related to these points, so I finally decided to, knock on wood, put pen to paper.

Matthew talks about things he agrees with (Oracle over MySQL when it comes to hierarchal data and set operators) and some of the things that can make Oracle, with all its power, fall by the wayside. This includes its licensing, the administration costs and some of the recent developments between Sun and MySQL.

ProDevTips.com has posted part nine of their long-running series about using the Zend Framework (and Smarty) to create a CMS/Community website.

This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I've also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it's own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.

They make updates to the bootstrap file to introduce another controller directory and, inside of that, create the Administrator controller and integrate it with a Smarty template to show different menu items if an admin user is logged in.

As posted on Nick Halstead's blog:

DevShed wraps up their look at databases in PHP (a excerpted from "Programming PHP, Second Edition") with this new tutorial showing how to insert and work with PDO prepared statements.

Concluding our discussion of databases and PHP, we'll finish building the [administration portion of the website] example that we started last week.

They start with the code for the administration page for adding a new record to the table - in this case, a business. They give the code to handle the submit and how to display a list of the current businesses. They wrap it up with a look at working with PHP Data Objects (PDO) and using them to create prepared statements.

Robert Treat has an announcement posted to his blog about the release of the latest version of the phpPgAdmin package - version 4.1.1.

The phpPgAdmin Team is proud to announce a new minor release of phpPgAdmin. Version 4.1.1 fixes several bugs reported to use from our users since the 4.1 release. Everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Feature of phpPgAdmin include:

• the ability to administer multiple servers
• Support for PostgreSQL 7.0.x, 7.1.x, 7.2.x, 7.3.x, 7.4.x, 8.0.x, 8.1.x, and 8.2.x
• Easy data manipulation (browse, execute, select/insert/update/delete)
• Dump table data in a variety of formats: SQL, COPY, XML, XHTML, CSV, Tabbed, pg_dump
• Excellent language support - available in 27 languages