Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

On the Windows Skills blog, there's a new post that talks about the use of a SQLite database (via PHP) to handle the assault that Digg.com can dish out to a popular webiste.

Physical memory was limited and Apache and MySQL soon started to fight for every remaining byte and eventually the page was unavailable. After this experience I started to look for a alternative for the database storage and I found an interesting one: SQLite.

He mentions some of the features the database has including zero-configuration, a simple API, and the portability of having a single database in a single file. The next step was getting it to work with his Apache/PHP5 installation and to run some statistics on it. The results show SQLite pulling ahead of MySQL (INNODB) by a bit and MySQL (MYISAM) by a good bit.