Andreas Gohr has a new blog post today that talks about a way to really get to know your code better - use XDebug to see it from the inside out.

Xdebug is a PHP extension which helps you to understand, debug and profile PHP. It can help you to find bottlenecks or give you an quick overview what happens in code you aren't familiar with, yet.

The post gives a brief overview of the installation of the extension (building a shared module) and shows how to get started with profiling an application. He talks about the cachegrind tool you can use to parse the results and the kcachegrind app that will make the results a bit more visual.

As a bonus, he also throws in a bit about function tracing - picking out each small bit of functionality in the code (the function/methods) and gathering stats for each.

With all of the good news they've posted about the mysqlnd driver, the developers behind the Internet Super Hero blog know that there will be bugs that come up in the driver. So, they've addressed the right way to find and deal with these issues in a new blog entry.

he bad news: mysqlnd might have bugs. How to report and debug these bugs - using mysqli_debug() - is subject of this posting.

They step you through the process for finding out what's causing the problems (internal versus external debugging) and how to make client traces with the mysqi extension to make it even easier for the developers to track down the problem. They also suggest a few things to send along with your bug report - like the PHP code calling it or the SQL you're using to select/update/insert/delete the data from your database.