What to expect:

Using this methodology, you’ll be able to move table definitions and the data contained within those tables. However, you will NOT move Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, etc.

Views arrive as simple tables, so be prepared to recreate them by hand. Procedures don’t arrive at all, so same “manuality” applies.

These are the steps to convert an MS-SQL database to MySql:

First, you will need access to a machine that runs MS-SQL, so if all you have is a .bak file, you will first need to restore a database from it within MS-SQL before you can covert it.

(Skip this step if your DB already up  and running).
If you don’t have MS-SQL running on your machine, download SQL Server Management Studio Express, a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to work with MS-SQL databases.
After installing, open the program and see if you can connect to your local machine. In my case I couldn’t becauseI didn’t have all the required services running.

To start the services, go to “Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services” and look for 2 services: “SQL Server”, and “SQL Server Browser”. Start those. Now SQLSMSE should let you connect.

To restore a database from a .bak file, simply right-click on the Databases item in the Object Explorer, select “Restore Database” and follow the directions. Voila, you should end up with a running MS-SQL database.

Now for the actual conversion to MySql:

You will need to have a MySql ODBC connector installed on your machine, which you can get from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/5.1.htm
(You don’t have to register to get the driver!)

Once installed, you need to add a new data source to your machine. Go to “Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Source” and under User DSN click “Add” and select the newly installed MySql ODBC driver. Then point this to the target MySql database (if it doesn’t yet exist, create it first).

Great! So now we have a source database, a target database, and both can transfer data via ODBC. All that’s left to do is fire up the Import / Export Data Wizard that comes with MS-SQL and select the appropriate input/output settings, and convert.

For this problem I want to bill Microsoft for an hour!
Here’s the gist: watch out when you use “_” in sub-domains.

Today I copied a website to a different subdomain on our dev-server, and I thought I add a “_bak” to the domain to tell things apart. All worked well, I thought, until my coworker tried to test the site using Internet Explorer 7 and found that she was unable to log in. No error either, just the same blank login form after submitting valid credentials.

Since all was working fine in Firefox, my first hunch smelled of cookies ;). And yup, IE rejected domain cookies from this sub-domain, and consequently session_start() generated a new session id for every request, effectively clearing the $_SESSION array which I was using for authentication.

Great Microsoft. Thanks for watching out for me. ,,|,,

If you’re working with classes a lot, you’ve probably come across the “static” keyword for properties and methods, enabling you to call these members straight on the class itself, without instantiating an object.


class UserPeer
{
protected static $userlist;

public static function getUserList()
{
return self::$userlist;
}
}
What’s a little less frequently encountered is a static variable inside a function (or a method for that matter). Say you have a function that returns something rather computing-intensive, but that’s called multiple times from different areas and you don’t want to re-compute every time, and you also don’t want to drag a global variable around.. then static is for you. Check this out:


function get_world_formula()
{
static $result;
if(!$result)
{
$result = //compute complex stuff here;
}
return $result;
}

Voila! A self-contained caching function. Obviously $result persists only for the duration of one request, but that’ll do just fine if it cuts down some CPU cycles. (It does add to the memory usage though, so be selective where you use it.) If you want to take this one step further, you can make caching optional by adding an extra parameter.


function get_world_formula($use_cache = true)
{
static $result;
if(!$result || !$use_cache)
{
$result = //compute complex stuff here;
}
return $result;
}

That’s it. Small but cute.

A word of OOP caution! I would not recommend using this approach in objects-methods, because this one static variable would be the same accross all object instances, so all objects would return the same data the first method call yielded, and this may not be appropriate for other objects. Use object properties instead to store chached results.

Please Note: There is an updated version of this post for Symfony 1.2

For all who are having problems getting a Symfony app to play nice with GoDaddy, here’s what you (most likely) need to tweak. First of all, I had to make the following entry in my settings.yml file:

path_info_key:          REDIRECT_URL

Then, and this was the real tricky part, I also needed to place a file called php5.ini at my site root, that contains the following line:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

This tells the godaddy server to actually respect this front.php/somepage syntax. Otherwise this will throw a 404 error.

Hope this helps.