One of the best ways to check the performance of your MySQL application is to benchmark it regularly. Put the application under as much load as you can to simulate the worst possible reasonable load and check the performance. Several functions within MySQL can help you to test your databases. One of the most useful…
One of the most critical tasks for a MySQL administrator is reliably backing up and restoring databases. This, of course, helps to prevent data loss in the event of a hardware failure, data corruption… or a little accident. Most modern hosting/server solutions have some kind of database backup solution available. However, many people prefer to…
MySQL can support large databases, but as the size of the data grows, the performance of your database can start to suffer. As a database administrator, there are a few things that you can do to improve the performance of your databases. The first place to start is with your hardware. As MySQL uses many…
PHP is a widely-used scripting language that allows web developers to produce dynamic web pages with ease. By embedding PHP code into the HTML source, developers can create web applications that can interact with databases, perform complex calculations, and generate content on the fly. Whether you are an experienced PHP developer or a beginner, there…
There are a few other methods that you can use to hide your usage of PHP from visitors to your website. Another trick is to use filenames without extensions and then tell Apache to process them as a PHP file. This can be done easily by amending your .htaccess file to include the following lines:…
If you are the web developer for a site, then you might not want visitors to know that you are using PHP for your scripting. One simple way around this is to use a different extension for the PHP files instead of the default .php. You can use any extension that you want, including: You…
It is common now for developers to use email as a means of communicating with users from the website. There are many reasons that you might want to do this, including: Before you start to configure your PHP scripts to send emails, you will first need to know some configuration settings for your email system….
If you are developing PHP code for a website, you might sometimes want to check which version of Apache or PHP will be running the website. This is particularly true if you use some functionality that was included in a particular revision of the software or if you want to avoid security holes that were…
If your website has a lot of images it is often convenient to create and show a dynamic thumbnail image. This will save on processor and download time for your visitors, who only have to download the images they want to see. One great way to do this is with the GD library. Before you…
When you are working on your website, you will sometimes want to change the level of error reporting that your code returns. This is a great way to get full diagnostic information to fix a problem in your latest piece of code, but be careful only to show error reporting on your test site and…
