One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:
- A new API based on PDO
- Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
- Support for using prepared statements
- A unified access API
- A query builder
- More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are keen on adding SQLite support, to ease local development.
- Support for master-slave replication (by randomly distributing reads among the hosts)
- Support for using different database types in parallel (e.g. using SQLite for read-only tables, MySQL for everything else)
The slides and a video of the presentation are available, if you want to check it out. There is a task list on the Drupal.org web site that keeps track of the ongoing activities.
The MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition is in full swing - we've already received a number of cool and interesting submissions, which we will turn into articles that will be published on the MySQL Developer Zone over the course of the coming weeks. Today we received a note from Jakub Vrána from the Prague, Czech republic. He's the author of phpMinAdmin, a MySQL management tool written in PHP. Here's what he wrote:
In the beginning of September 2008, I have implemented MySQL 5.1 Events to the database management tool phpMinAdmin. I've used the Windows version of MySQL 5.1.26 for the development.
As phpMinAdmin tries to be full-featured, yet compact management tool, I have implemented Events to allow users of MySQL 5.1 manage it.
The implementation was quite straightforward, it took only 4.5 kB of PHP code. Events management is well described in MySQL documentation and easy to understand.
During the development, I've reported three bugs: Bug#39163, Bug#39165, Bug#39173. I have been positively surprised by the speed of reaction to these reports
Thank you very much for your submission and the support, Jakub! We appreciate it.
If you're reading this and are using MySQL 5.1 and any of it's new features: have you considered telling your story yet? You may even win something when doing so!
