phpMyAdmin

Two phpMyAdmin projects in GSoC 2008

Michal Čihař — 2008-04-23T00:18:46+02:00

Well I did not expect that much when MySQL offered us to piggyback on their participation in GSoC 2008, but at the end we have two projects. One is about blobstreaming which I absolutely don't know and is probably some amazing new technology :-). Marc will act as a sponsor on this together with some guys from http://www.blobstreaming.org.

The second project is setup rewrite where I will act as a mentor and Piotr Przybylski will implement it. Hopefully we will bring this to successful end and soon phpMyAdmin will bring you easier way to set up and configure it's options.

Similarity in project names

Michal Čihař — 2008-04-09T08:09:55+02:00

While looking at poll about Czech open source for first time, I was surprised that two of my projects got in - phpMyAdmin and Wammu. After looking again at that page I noticed there is a typo in phpMyAdmins name, it was written as phpMinAdmin. Then I looked even more carefully and even URL it is pointing to is something different. In this time I realized that it is something completely different with just very similar name. phpMinAdmin is some minimalistic clone of phpMyAdmin, but why they could not choose a bit more different name?

PS: Anyway you can still vote for Wammu in Czech open source :-).

phpMyAdmin is in Summer of Code

Michal Čihař — 2008-04-04T15:43:51+02:00

Well not directly, but MySQL is and they will also accept our projects. So if you are student interested in getting some money for improving free software, you're welcome to contact us. We have written down our ideas to wiki, but feel free to come with your own thought. But don't forget that deadline is this Monday!

While talking about this improving phpMyAdmin, phpMyAdmin team would also like to take part in Hackontest, so vote and suggest there features for us! If you have no idea for phpMyAdmin, Debian is also taking part there ;-).

phpMyAdmin has export to Texy!

Michal Čihař — 2008-01-16T12:26:46+02:00

I just commited export to Texy! into phpMyAdmin SVN. I originally wrote it only as an example for article on Czech phpMyAdmin pages (to be published next Monday), but at the end it turned to be interesting for more people and it ended in SVN, so you can expect it 3.0 release.

To see how it actually looks like, you can go to Texy! demo.

New databases in phpMyAdmin demo

Michal Čihař — 2007-11-28T21:03:17+02:00

I just added all MySQL example databases to phpMyAdmin demo, so if you want to play with some more or less real data in phpMyAdmin, you now have great opportunity. Especially interesting is sakila database which exposes many new MySQL features.

All databases are automatically periodically restored, so you don't have to be afraid to play with it :-).

Czech pages about phpMyAdmin

Michal Čihař — 2007-11-01T17:05:11+02:00

After two weeks of testing, I'd like to announce Czech pages about phpMyAdmin - http://phpmyadmin.cz/. You will find there various tips and howtos for using phpMyAdmin as well as project and development news. I'd like to build there a community where people could find help about this tool in their native language, but I have no idea whether it has a chance to succeed. Anyway the domain name was cheap so I had to try to realize idea, which was sitting in my head for quite a long time.

Troubles on being popular

Michal Čihař — 2007-06-12T14:54:55+02:00

phpMyAdmin is quite popular tool and it attracts people who want to earn money on it. For long time Navicat company used phpMyAdmin name to propagate their completely different product, but this seems to be gone now (probably with help from Google, but I haven't receive reply from them, but short after my complain, all their ads abusing phpMyAdmin were gone).

Today Marc spotted that somebody just stole our website added Google shopping cart and started to sell phpMyAdmin:

Lets see how long will it take to get them down.

PS: There is intentionally no link in this post, you can see URL on screenshot, if you really want.

Update: It looks like hosting is very responsible on such problems, they just disabled this domain:

Hello,

Thank-you for your e-mail enquiry.

Please be advised that we have disabled site php-my-admin.awardspace.com.

AWARDSPACE.COM provides legitimate web hosting services and has a ZERO tolerance policy towards these violations.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. If you still have any concerns in regards this matter feel free to contact us.

Best Regards, Harry

AWARDSPACE Dedicated Support Team support@awardspace.com

/"Your winning web hosting provider"/ http://www.awardspace.com

MediaWiki caching

Michal Čihař — 2007-05-23T10:25:00+02:00

Steve, I know that caching usually helps. But from all test I've made with MediaWiki installation on phpMyAdmin wiki, I can see that enabling any caching slows things down quite a lot.

With memcached based caching, each request takes about 15 seconds, if I add XCache backend for variables, it slows down things to 10 seconds and I receive same results with file based caching. So it doesn't seem to be problem with memcached, but rather MediaWiki issue. Unfortunately it's quite a lot of PHP code to investigate and I didn't find anything obvious in low level caching interface.

So say good bye to variable caching, opcode cache is enough for now and MySQL seems to handle the load quite well.

Xcache opcode cacher

Michal Čihař — 2007-05-22T14:28:22+02:00

As I wrote in previous post, memcached didn't help as expected with wiki performace, so it was time to look for something else.

Since I'm using lighttpd, I still considered using of XCache, but the Debian package is not really up to date (now it even does not install with current php), so it was too much effort.

But today I decided it's time to try it. I built package from current version (you can get it on debian.cihar.com), installed and it seems to increase performance a lot. Most visible it is on wiki pages, which now take about quarter of time to process. I only hope it won't have any stability impacts, but it survived fine stress tests I did so far.

Caching slows things down?

Michal Čihař — 2007-05-22T13:35:28+02:00

I've been using memcached for some time on phpMyAdmin wiki and it seemed to help. But recently the performance went down. I didn't have time to investigate it till today and it turns out to be caused by memcached. When I switch it off, page load time goes from 16 seconds to 0.25 seconds.

I tried to search for some similar problems on the net, but I didn't succeed. So for now wiki runs without memcached and I will look at other possibilities of caching later.

Update: If you're interested about versions, it is MediaWiki: 1.7.1, PHP: 5.2.3-1 (cgi-fcgi), MySQL: 5.0.41-Debian_2-log and I have enabled persistent connections to MySQL.