I haven’t attended too many tutorials or sessions this year. Yesterday I saw Jim Winstead’s Practical I18N with PHP and MySQL and David Sklar’s Cleaning Up SOAP.
Right now I’m sitting in Adam Trachtenberg’s PHP 5 + MySQL 5 = A Perfect 10. He quipped that it really should’ve been called PHP 5 + MySQL 4.1 = A Perfect 9.1, but the O’Reilly folks didn’t think the title was sexy enough.
Initially we looked at the mysqli (“MySQL Improved”) extension which offers prepared statements, an Object-Oriented interface, and the ability to query the database over SSL.
Next, Adam started speaking about new MySQL 4.1 features. He gave some tips on how to use the new subselect functionality, reminding the audience to think carefully about using = or IN if the subselect returns a single or multiple rows. Then he spoke about MySQL 5.0 features such as Stored Procedures, Cursors and Views.