Rob Allen has a tip for the Zend Framework users out there using the Zend_Db module to connect to their database resources - how to do a one to many join with the help of Zend_Db_Table_Select (easier than it sounds).

Let's say that you want to set up a one-to-many relationship between two tables: Artists and Albums because you've refactored my ZF1 tutorial. [...] Assuming you're using Zend_Db_Table, the easiest way is to turn off the integrity check and do a join in a mapper or table method.

He includes a few lines of source to illustrate, calling the "setIntegrityCheck" value to "false" to tell ZF not to worry about the additional join value over to the artists table. The result is a new column value with the artist's name instead of just the ID.

On Developer Drive today there's a new post (the first in a series) from Gerald Hanks about building an ad tracker in PHP. In this first part he sets up some of the background - the database that will hold the tracker information.

Banner ads for services related to the web site owner's industry allow customers to view products that tie into the site owner's core business. In exchange, the web site owner can charge the banner ad owner for every impression (banner ad appearance) or click-through (when a user clicks the banner ad). In order to build a banner ad management system, we must first create the database tables that will hold the ad information, the client data and the activity schedule for each ad.

He includes the SQL you'll need to create a few tables - the tracking table for the ads themselves (their metadata), the clients table to handle the groups wanting the ads and the activity table to track views and click-throughs.

In response to some of the comments being made about the hash table Denial of Service attack recently posted Freek Lijten has posted his thoughts about the real problem with the whole situation - how it was handled by the communities involved.

Interesting they may be, but I want to address what in my opinion is the real problem: The way the communication around it was handled by different projects and the fact that the exploit could still exist at all. [...] In the presentation Wälde and Klink talk about their disclosure process. The PHP project had them wait 3 weeks for a first response while this is obviously a serious matter.

He argues that things like a commit message mentioning a DoS prevention fix instead of just mentioning the fix have the potential to do more harm than good. He also points out that other communities were notified of the problem (like Python) and some still haven't responded to the issue.

This attack was the result of good research and it is important that it is disclosed. More importantly however is the fact that organisation got by with years of not noticing it and even worse, reacted very poor after being informed. I can't say I have a ready solution to avoid these kind of things in the future, perhaps that will prove to be an interesting discussion.

The Developer Drive blog has the latest post in their "PHP User Survey" series focusing on setting up admin functionality for the poll managers to use.

In Part I of this series, we started the process of creating user polls for a business web site. Part I gave the layout of the data layer and began the construction of the class file. In this part we will continue with adding methods to the class file that will enable the administrator to set the variable values and read from the database tables.

Code is included for setting the poll and answer ID values (setters), grabbing the number of polls currently defined, finding the active ones and pulling out poll data along with its answers. If you need to catch up, you can find the other parts here: part one, part two.

On Developer Drive today they've posted the most recent article in a tutorial series showing you how to create a user survey that stores the results to a database table. In this latest tutorial, they show how to hook the current code into a MySQL backend.

In the first two parts of this series, we created the data layer that will hold the polling data and established methods for setting the variable values and reading from the database tables. In this part, we will build the methods that will write new polls and answers to the tables.

They include the code for an "addPoll" method that inserts the questions and answers for the polls. Their "editPoll" method updates the poll questions/answers and the "addVote" method does exactly like it sounds - adding a vote to one of the poll options. Also included are "deletePoll", "activatePoll" and "deactivatePoll".

On the php|architect site there's a recent tutorial from Jeremy Kendall about full-text searching in SQLite, a lightweight database alternative that, since it's stored locally, can be used without a full database server.

Full-text search with SQLite is so ridiculously easy to implement, there are only two valid reasons you haven't done it yet. The first is you don't need the full-text capability, and the second is you didn't know it could be done.

In his method he creates a full-text search table (using fts4) and populating it with your data. You can use the "MATCH" keyword in your SQL to find the closest matches and even handy modifiers like "NEARBY", wildcards and token/prefixes in queries. For more detailed information, check out the SQLite documentation for a full guide.

Till Klampaeckel has a new post today looking at a solution for a common need - paginating through results as pulled from a database. With the help of the Zend_Db_Table and Zend_Paginator components of the Zend Framework it's a simple matter of passing the results into the Paginator and asking for a certain page.

So frequently, I need to run small data migrations or transformations. Especially on the way to Doctrine, there's a lot to clean-up in a database which has been used and evolved over five years or so.

Code snippets are included to define a class for the table, extending Zend_Db_Table_Abstract, and a new Zend_Paginator_Adapter_DbTableSelect object to create the paginated results. After that, it's as simple as setting the number of items per page and asking for a certain page. There's even a quick bit about being able to edit the rows inside the paginator directly (they're just Zend_Db_Table_Row records).

On Hyperpolyglot.org there's an interesting listing of scripting language syntax - PHP, Python, Ruby and Perl - showing some of their common syntax and data structures side by side.

Sections of the reference sheet include

• arithmetic and logic
• arrays
• execution control
• libraries and modules
• objects
• reflection

It's interesting to see how the various languages compare, where some have shortcuts for things and others fail at the same (or make it much more difficult). Descriptions for the different row types are also included.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Octavia Anghel introducing you to Smarty, a PHP-based templating engine that can make creating the layouts and output of your site simpler and easier to reuse.

Smarty is a template engine for PHP whose main goal is to facilitate a very useful way to separate the business logic from the presentation logic. This article introduces Smarty and demonstrates how to install the template, create an application from scratch and interact with a database.

Installation of the tool is simple and using it is as easy as including the Smarty class, configuring it a bit through method calls and outputting to a template (tpl) file. A both a "Hellow World" and slightly more complex example using database results to build a table are included.

Lorna Mitchell has a new post today spotlighting a handy feature of the phpMyAdmin tool - the visual designer view. It allows you to build (and see) the relationships between your MySQL-based application's elements.

I'm happier at the command line, but needed some graphical representation of information and easy ways to export example queries for the book I'm working on. I noticed that phpMyAdmin now has a Designer tab, which shows relationships between tables and allows you to define them.

She includes two screenshots of the process of setting up a foreign key on two tables. You can find lots more articles related to the designer view here.