The Secret Php-pg Connection

Normally when you discuss [http://www.php.net/ PHP] and database driven websites, the first thing that comes to mind is [http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html my][http://www.mysql.com/ $][http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html ql]. Certainly there is no denying the tight integration these two products had during the early days of open source, and the sheer number of applications that are tied between the two. Lately though I have seen a few cracks in the armor with regard to PostgreSQL making inroads into the PHP community. Two really great examples have come out of [http://zend.com/php10anniversary/ ZendCon], the PHP based conference sposored by Zend Corp. This first was from [http://www.trachtenberg.com/blog/2005/10/21/zendcon-days-3-and-4/trackback/ Adam Trachtenberg’s blog report] were he metions a presentation by Andrew Sukow about how he is making use of PHP and PostgreSQL to provide data mining and analysis tools he’s writing to help eBay sellers and other people learn what’s going on in the marketplace. Adam mentions that the database grows by about 6GB a day and they keep 3-4 months of data on hand, or roughly 500 GB stored inside of PostgreSQL. Sweet! The second was another happy review on [http://mechanismalley.com/blog/2005/10/20/zend-conference-notes-day-three/ Mechanism Alley] about the [http://www.adp.com/ ADP] presentation. From the blog post: …where they apparently really make their money ($1 billion) is in car dealership software — soup to nuts, hardware, software, systems integration. That’s a mature market, only a couple real competitors left in the space, lots of “boutique” applications. ADP’s solution that they’re deploying now is all PHP and PostgreSQL. They have nearly 10k on-site deployments (all running Zend Platform), and a growing ASP business. What I really like about both of these examples is that the interaction between the Zend community and the PostgreSQL community is darn near non-existent (especially with Zend pimpining it’s Oracle integration), and yet we still got some high powered representation at the conference. Hopefully we’ll hear more of these stories as time goes on, I know they are out there and people would be served well to hear about them. Oh yeah, one more example that occured this week: [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2005-10/msg00279.php a request from PHP Quebec] to the PostgreSQL press list for PostgreSQL oriented submissions. We really don’t get a lot of these requests, especially from PHP oriented conferences, so any light at the end of this tunnel should be considered progress.