If you're relatively new to PHP development or have just meaning to get into using relational databases with your application, you should check out this new post from NetTuts giving a "for dummies" approach to learning about RDBMSes.

Web apps can be split into two major components: a front-end that displays and collects information, and a back-end for storing the information. In this article, I'll demonstrate what a relational database is, and how to properly design your database to store your app's information.

They describe the usage of a database in several steps (no code is included, just SQL at the end):

• Get Some Data
• Remove Repetitive Data Across Columns
• Remove Repetitive Data Across Rows
• Linking Tables with Keys

This is followed by links to a few of the different RDBMSes out there and a brief introduction to what SQL is and what it looks like.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll on their site today. The question of the week this time was "which of the following is your favorite category of PHP functionality?"

Among the options, there was "General PHP", "PHP Design", "PHP & XML" and "PHP Security". The one that came out on top, however, was "PHP & Databases" with 26.4% of the vote. Next in line was tied up between two options - "General PHP" and "PHP & Business/Ingegration" both with 15.3% of the votes.

Be sure anc check out (and vote on) their new poll for the week asking readers what they think is the biggest advantage of making to move to PHP5 for their scripts.

From Ana Aman's Blogspot blog today, there's a quick post with a helpful hint for anyone working with PHPMyAdmin experiencing freeze-ups.

If you are using phpmyadmin on a database with more 1500 or more tables, you may experience problems. The page will not load at all so you will not be able to operate propery with phpmyadmin.

Of course you can still run commands from a terminal or console but it is not as confortable as using phpmyadmin.

The solution? Following a bit of digging, Ana discovered that upping the memory limit for the server PHPMyAdmin installed on makes a world of difference.

This new post on the Sitening.com blog (written up by Tyler Hall) today takes a look at PHP and databases (MySQL specifically in this case) and "getting real" with them.

He proceeds to show a class that can perform operations similar to those styled in RoR - creating the object, applying proterties to it and performing the action (inserts/delete/etc). It's all made possible through the use of the __get and __set functions offered in PHP5. From there, it's just a simple matter of defining the functions for the actions.

To bring the point home, he also includes some examples of how to use this kind of functionality with a bit more than the previous example - selecting, updating, deleting, and inserting a new record (including the action function for each). Lastly, he gives an example of extending this base class, as mentioned in his first example (creating an object like "Animal" or "User" to abstract out the connections even more.