Application Metrics

Using User-Defined Varibles in MySQL

• September 28, 2006

• MySQL

Cast the first stone he who never made a mistake modeling a database! Every now and then in your career you will be face to face with a problem like this: due to the nature of a table’s data you created a table without a primary key, or using a composed key. So far so good, but due to an upgrade you see the need to have a unique key identifying all the registers in your table, in my case it was due to a AJAX interface.

So what now? You have a table full of data, and of course, as Murphy’s law will tell you, that data cannot be erased. MySQL will prevent you from turning a filled to a primary key if it finds duplicated values in the table. Quite a brain twister, but I did a little research and found a rather simple solution to the matter.

UPDATE: So it actually came to my atention that a query I had already tried does the job in an even simpler form, but my modelling tool executed the commands out of sync and that why i had problems. So this article stays on as a good example of how to use mysql variables.

Managing Test Users in Facebook

• February 7, 2011

• PHP , Tools

Recently Facebook implemented a new and more secure way of creating test users for your applications using the new Graph API. This new resource creates test users per application, allowing the developers of these apps to login as these users and test out their app’s functionality without using their own accounts and throwing test information into their live activity feed, this makes it very easy and clean to test new applications.

Annotations in PHP, They Exist.

• August 30, 2014

Annotations are more than phpdoc comments, they’re a fully-featured way of including additional information alongside your code. We might have rejected an RFC to add support into the PHP core, but the community has embraced this tool anyway! This session shows you who is doing what with annotations, and will give you some ideas on how to use the existing tools in your own projects to keep life simple. Developers, architects and anyone responsible for the technical direction of an application should attend this session.