On the Laravel News site there's a new post about a feature in the v5.5 release of the popular framework: pivot casting.

A new addition to Laravel 5.5 will add support for pivot table casts when inserting & updating data on an intermediate table model.

Currently, the $casts you set on a traditional model will work in both directions; any model that extends the EloquentModel class will look for a $casts property and convert the specified attributes to a data type when reading and writing.

[...] Now with Laravel 5.5, the $casts property on the EloquentModel and EloquentRelationsPivot classes will behave the same. Laravel will “respect” your casts on both, whether you’re reading, inserting or updating data.

In an interesting mix of "old" and "new" Rob Allen as shown in this new post to his site how to push binary data into a SQL Server database from a Zend Framework v1 application.

If you want to insert binary data into SQL Server in Zend Framework 1 then you probably used the trick of setting an array as the parameter's value with the info required by the sqlsrv driver as noted in Some notes on SQL Server blobs with sqlsrv.

[...] Working through the problem, I discovered that this is due to Zend_Db_Statement_Sqlsrv converting the $params array to references with this code. The Sqlsrv driver (v4) for PHP 7 does not like this! As Zend Framework 1 is EOL, we can't get a fix into upstream and update the new release, so we have to write our solution.

He includes the code for the "hack" that you'd normally have to do to push the binary data into the database. Zend Framework v1 is EOL (end of life) so the Zend_Db_Statement_Sqlsrv class can't be updated. Instead, he writes his own replacement, creating a new adapter specific to the application that handles the input as the SQL Server driver is expecting. He then updates the application configuration to force the new adapter to be used when the ZF1 application needs to connect to the SQL Server database.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her site with a quick tip for any of the Phinx users out there around a new feature they've added: database seeding.

Database patching is a wicked hard problem, one that's got a bit easier in my world lately as I've been using Phinx on a few projects. [...] One thing I didn't immediately find was how to insert data. Phinx has seed functionality but in this case I needed to put in a lookup table to go along with a data structure change.

She includes a code examples of this new feature, showing how to create a roles table and seed it with a new record with a "name" value of "admin". She also mentions one "gotcha" in the name of the function used to save the data to the new table (saveData versus just save).

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an introduction to using Elasticsearch in your PHP applications. In it author Wern Ancheta covers some of the basics of this powerful tool and helps you get an example script up and running for testing.

In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at Elasticsearch and how we can use it in PHP. Elasticsearch is an open-source search server based on Apache Lucene. We can use it to perform super fast full-text and other complex searches. It also includes a REST API which allows us to easily issue requests for creating, deleting, updating and retrieving of data.

He starts by helping you get Elasticsearch itself installed via the apt-get package manager (may slightly differ depending on your OS of choice) and tested with a simple web-based request to the port the server is running on. With the server set up he then moves on to the PHP aspect, helping you get the elasticsearch library installed via Composer and creating a new client instance. He then includes code examples of some of the main operations you'll perform with entries in the Elasticsearch instance: inserting a document, updating a document, deleting and - of course - searching for documents matching certain simple and more complex criteria.

In this new post to his blog, Rob Allen has posted notes on some of his experience in working with blobs with SQL Server using UTF-8.

This turned out to be easy enough: Use ntext, nvarchar types in the database and add resources.db.params.driver_options.CharacterSet = "UTF-8" to your application.ini

He also includes some code to fix a problem he spotted with storing binary data into a varbinary field giving him an error about string translation. The fix came in the way of replacing the direct file_get_contents assignment to a variable over to a binding method that specified the data type as well.

On the CatsWhoCode.com blog today they share an alternative method for getting content into your WordPress blog - a programmatic approach pushing it directly in through bits of code.

Recently, a client of mine asked me to write an article importer for his WordPress powered site, which was a very interesting project for me. In this article, I'll show you how you can easily add data (posts, comments, categories, etc) to your WordPress blog, without any manual effort.

They describe and show examples for a few different types of inserts:

• Inserting posts
• Inserting comments
• Adding categories to a post
• Adding tags to a post
• Automatically create a custom field when a post is published

Code snippets are provided for each.

All of you Oracle users out there might want to check out this recent post from Chris Jones, especially if you've been using the XMLType columns in your tables.

Today a reader mailed me about manipulating XMLType columns when the data is longer than the 4K limit that character-type handling imposes. My free book (see sidebar) has examples of how to do this using CLOB handling in PHP. I noticed that my xmlinsert.php example in the book does a SELECT and UPDATE, but never actually does an INSERT.

To correct the problem of the missing example he includes example code to connect to the database, push the XML into a bind variable and select the row back out to ensure everything's still structured correctly. You need to set up a new descriptor for the insert to work (CLOB).

Eran Galperin has made a recent post about performing multiple row operations in MySQL - inserts and updates.

Multiple row operations are in common use in a normalized application databases as one database entity is often linked to multiple sub-entities (for example a user and his tags). [...] Too often I've seen such queries ran in long loops one at a time, which is very bad for performance (as I will show here) and sometimes equally bad for integrity (if the process is interrupted). So what are the alternatives?

His alternatives include concatenation of values for an insert (rather than looping) and updating the information with a "ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE" statement or, for multiple tables, using a join.

Rob Allen had a problem - he needed to get the "pound" (as in the British monetary unit) into his MySQL database. His database didn't seem to want to comply:

Everyone else probably already knows this stuff, but I hit an issue today to that took a while to sort out. Fortunately, some kind folks on IRC helped me, but as it's embarrassing to ask for help on the same issue twice, I'm writing down what I've learned! The problem: Get a £ character stored to MySQL, retrieved and then displayed without any weird characters in front of it using UTF8.

His solution? Make sure you're using UTF-8 everywhere, not just when trying to insert into the database - in the broser's headers (both going in and coming out) and in the MySQL database insert. He gives code examples for each including database examples for PDO and the Zend_Db component of the Zend Framework.

In this new post to his blog Johannes Schluter looks at creating a storage engine plugin for MySQL via its plugin interface.

MySQL 5.1 has a plugin interface to easily add storage engines. PHP can easily embedded into other applications. So why not combine these two things? - Writing a MySQL Storage Engine which reads data by calling a PHP script.

He starts with a basic example with create_table and open_table functions that can pull the data from the table marked with the "Engine" setting of PHP. He expands on this to allow for more functionality - update, delete and write methods are added.