I'm looking for someone who wants to hone their existing 3+ years of C hacking and debugging skills on some of the fastest, most highly stressed core infrastructure applications ever created.

The full job description is available on the OmniTI Careers page.

A successful applicant for the position will join the ranks of my Dark Apprentices and will have the opportunity to learn and develop skills such as:

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I was just skimming over Santos' Post about SDO, and was saddened to see more anecdotes and less facts.

Here are two points that you should take note of:

• PDO is an "ultra fast direct layer to the database".
• The benchmarks I think you're referring to do not include the magic turbo switch I talk about here, that highlights performance problems when using prepared statements, which are on by default.

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PHP 5.1.3 was just released, including the latest PDO and PDO drivers. If you're still running older releases of PHP you should probably upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade the PHP core then you'll be pleased to know that I've also released the PHP 5.1.3 versions of PDO, PDO::MYSQL, PDO::PGSQL, PDO::SQLITE and PDO::ODBC to PECL--these are the versions that I've had time to personally test.

These are identical to the code in PHP 5.1.3, with the exception of PDO::ODBC, which includes two additional bug fixes that didn't make it in time.

Enjoy!

On a related note, I noticed that people were downloading PHP 5.1.2 and then trying to build older PDO drivers from PECL into it, and then filing bugs when it didn't work. Don't do that; it really doesn't make sense. As a general rule, PHP 5.1 and higher bundle PDO, so if the version of PHP you are using is newer than the latest PECL package, stick with the version of PDO that ships with PHP. If the PECL package is newer, then go for that instead.

I tried to upload my slides from the conference, but run into problems with a firewall somewhere, so they've had to wait for me to return home.

So, here we are: Using MySQL with PDO (PDF).

This was my first MySQL users conference, and it seemed to go well. Truth be told, I'm not a database fanatic (which is ironic considering my involvement with PDO), so I didn't find a lot of the material to my taste. I did learn a few things from Jim Winsteads embedded mysql talk (something I bet he'll be surprised to hear :) and also Hartmut Holzgraefe's mysqli talk. I also got to chat to Monty about the issues I mentioned and meet some new faces, including my Evil sysadmin, some old and some older faces (Hi Sterling :)

The conference was quite big; 1500 attendees, 6 tech tracks (there were a couple of other non-tech tracks too, but I forget exactly what they covered) and a lot of BOF sessions. If MySQL is your bread and butter, you might want to consider attending the next one.