SSD love

That's right, I've got the SSD love.

Earlier this week a Crucial CT64M225 arrived. My initial surprise was of how light it was. Obviously it wasn't going to be heavy, but after years of playing with 2.5" drives in laptops and more recently servers, I was expecting a bit more weight to the thing. Chris convinced me to pop it in over lunch, which I did with great results: An average read speed of 224.8MB/s, a burst speed of 189MB/s, with a random access time of 0.1ms. In comparison to my fake RAID 0 (2x500GB Samsung Spinpoints at 7200rpm) running at an average read speed of 153.3.8MB/s, a burst speed of 307.4MB/s, with a random access time of 12.7ms (which isn't exactly that slow either tbh).

I've retained my RAID array for data, but the OS is entirely on the SSD. If you're thinking about a new build. this is almost certainly the way you want to go within the next 6-12 months. I can certainly see the benefits of SSDs in a small database servers, although server grade stuff is still fairly expensive and only available from a few vendors out of the box.

I'd love to get another, but the only thing preventing me is the price. I'd absolutely love to have a second in here to use as play device for Linux or OpenSolaris as a quick-boot OS for anything but games or work, but at £120-ish for 64GB, it's a little on the prohibitive side. Of course, I could use the old Windows partition on the RAID 0, however after being stung by launchpad bug #380138/#219393 last time I did a rebuild, I'm not sure I have the patience to keep with the seeming ever changing outcome of a "libata: kernel options vs /etc/modprobe.d" argument.

Zend Framework and the PHP Sqlsrv extension

On the off chance you're intending to do any development with using SqlSrv and ZF, I'd suggest taking a cursory look at ZF-7431 before hand. Equally if you're planning on doing any dev with Sqlsrv and plan to migrate to other SQL platforms later, then it could be just as helpful.

The fact that SqlSrv will return PHP objects is rather nice, unless you already have existing code that assumes strings are returned, like almost all other database extensions available for PHP. The easiest "fix" to allow your code to work across as many systems as possible is to ensure that you pass in ReturnDatesAsStrings as an option.