MySQL Field Types Cheatsheet
If you have been using MySQL for your database choice, you'll probably find this cheatsheet to be pretty useful. Whether you are new to MySQL or advanced, this is pretty handy to have around. A help page on help.scibit.com offers a great breakdown of the different datatypes that are available for use in MySQL. They cheatsheet lists the data type, the reasons for use, and the size of the data type. This is a quick and easy reference that will hopefully help out.
MySQL Field Types [via dzone]
phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 Relesased
For those of you that are as hooked on phpMyAdmin as I am, you will be happy to know that there is a new version available. phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 includes a number of improvements and fixes.
The list of improvements includes security updates, language updates, export fixes, and general patches. The release notes highlight a few specific improvements: "this version has a new setup mechanism and supports BLOBstreaming and the Swekey hardware authentication" (release notes).
You can view the release notes for full details concerning the new release and download the new version from sourceforge.
How In-Demand Are Your Skills?
Have you ever wondered if your skills are in demand? With so many different possibilities available for web development, it is tough to know if you should keep mastering a specific technology or start learning a new one. After reading an article about how PHP programming jobs are in high demand, I asked myself the follow-up question: what other skills do I have that are in high demand, and which skills do I have that are not?
The article linked to a great resource from oDesk that lists the current (monthly) trends for many of the development and design skills used for web development. There are 84 different trends with a wealth of useful information about the skill's demand including graphs, stats, and recent job postings. Although these stats are pulled from information specifically on oDesk, it represents demand from all around the world. I have listed links to some of the most in-demand skills right now.
As a side note, this site is a fantastic example of how great the Google Chart API is.
phpMyAdmin 2.11.8.1 Released Yesterday
phpMyAdmin 2.11.8.1 was released yesterday. The main reason for the updated release is to patch bugs and security issues. There were some XSS problems reported by Aung Khant from the YGN Ethical Hacker Group. The two main fixes are both XSS related, one having to do with frames and the other has to do with a lack of HTML escaping. You can read more about these by visiting the site which contains the news release about these bug/security fixes from phpMyAdmin. These vulnerabilities were considered very serious and have now been patched with this new release. Be sure to upgrade your copy to 2.11.8.1. You can download the new release from SourceForge.
Unable to Use mysqldump on a Shared Host? Here’s an Alternative
I have used many shared hosting providers throughout my years as a webmaster. Shared hosts have many great points, namely, price, and then they have their major drawbacks. For me, one of the major drawbacks is the limited use of the machine on which your site is hosted.
For instance, I love phpMyAdmin for maintaining and managing my databases, but I am not a fan of the need to log in to backup the databases. The easiest way around that of course would be to execute the mysqldump command that comes bundled with MySQL. Unfortunately, most shared hosts, all that I have dealt with, disable the ability to use exec() or system() with PHP to execute the MySQL native command. If these were available, creating a cron job on a simple PHP file that ran mysqldump would have worked perfectly. However, this wasn't the case. After looking around for a long time at a possible way around this, I came up empty handed. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or looked in all the wrong places, but I was left with nothing. I needed to back up my databases at regular intervals and found it frustrating to log into phpMyAdmin to do this each time. So I did what I should have done to begin with... wrote my own back-up tool.
It is pretty simple and self-explanatory. I did not create it as a function to be called, although you are more than welcome to do so. The main advantage to calling it, I think, would be to pass variables. For my needs, I simply set it up in the directory. I wanted it to run and back up whichever database needed to be. The script simply backs up the database specified in an sql file located in the same directory as the script itself. The file is named in this format, "DB_Backup_YourDatabase_YYYY-MM-DD.sql"; this could be easily modified to save anywhere you have permissions to save. The code is completely free and you can do what you would like with it. If you are feeling generous, throw a shout out my way or maybe even donate, but neither is not required.
This script was written and used on a server running PHP Version 4.4.2 and MySQL Version 4.1.22.