As Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes.” His point, while political, has a good perspective on one of life’s ever-persistent truths: the fact that governments exist in every country, and, largely, they have some of the same benefits and drawbacks everywhere.

One of the most hotly contested points of my article on database design was the suggestion that developers drop the use of ENUM and use something else instead. Lots of people argued in favor of ENUM; however, there are several good reasons why developers should reconsider ENUM and use it sparingly.

When I started writing this blog post, I had titled it “Tips for Designing Databases” and I planned to talk about various database design techniques. However, as I did more and more research, it dawned on me that one of the most crucial, and most overlooked, components of database development, is the selection of data [...]

Last week, I received an email from someone who told me how the Suhosin patch had created problems for their team, and suggested that I write about it here. I thought this was a great idea, for a number of reasons. Particularly, Suhosin is one of those PHP patches that alters the way PHP operates [...]

In the last two entries we have talked about the concept of layer abstraction: that is, that exceptions should not be allowed to pass out of one layer and into another. So, when an exception is raised in the database layer it should be caught in the controller. But how do we go about making [...]