Brian Swan's Blog

In the post I wrote last week about transaction isolation levels I left out an important option: the snapshot isolation level for database transactions. I’ll cover the snapshot isolation level in this post, and (as in my earlier post) I’ll look at what happens at the database level when using a particular isolation level (rather than concentrating on PHP data access code). I should also point out that in my earlier post I covered the ANSI standard isolation levels, which are implemented by most relational database management systems (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, etc.). However, the snapshot isolation level is not an ANSI standard and is not implemented by all database management systems (including MySQL), so this post isn’t necessarily as database-agnostic as my earlier post. That said, the concepts in this post are broadly applicable to many (just not all) RDBMS.

Here’s the list of interesting links I came across this week…

I had the good fortune of meeting Eli White, a junior at University of Washington and a PHP developer of 7 years, for the first time at the local Seattle PHP Meet Up a few months ago. I then ran into him recently at Microsoft where I found he is doing an internship on the ASP.NET team. I had lunch with Eli last week and we talked about the work he’s doing on Web Matrix and Razor. I thought his perspective as a PHP developer on Web Matrix and Razor were worth sharing…

Last week I had the good fortune of presenting at the the Seattle PHP Meet Up on a topic I knew only a little about: transaction isolation levels. It was fun doing the homework to learn more and I’ll share what I learned in this post. However, before diving in, I want to call out two things:

I missed last week’s list because I was out enjoying the last of our summer weather in in the Pacific northwest, so this week’s list spans two weeks…

If you are having trouble making sense of the title of this post, I don’t blame you. To clear things up, here’s what this post is about (which I couldn’t fit any more concisely into a title): The SQL Azure Labs team has made it possible to consume data in SQL Azure as an OData feed. And, you can set up an OData feed so that only authenticated users (authenticated with the AppFabric access control service, or ACS) can access it. In this post, I’ll show you how to consume these protected feeds using PHP.

Some time back I wrote a post about how to run multiple PHP versions on the same server with IIS (Running Multiple PHP Versions with IIS). While running multiple PHP versions wasn’t complicated, it wasn’t a no-brainer either. Today, Ruslan Yakushev (a Program Manager on the IIS team at Microsoft), announced the beta release the PHP Manager project on CodePlex: PHP Manager for IIS 7 – beta release.  Not only does the PHP Manager make it a no-brainer to run different PHP versions side-by-side on IIS, it makes it easy to register PHP with IIS, configure various PHP settings, enable/disable PHP extensions, remotely manage PHP configuration via the php.ini file, and check the PHP runtime configuration and environment (i.e. see the output of phpinfo()). Read his announcement for a complete tour of this release (and provide feedback!). I’ll just take a quick look at how easy it is to get multiple PHP versions running in this post.

The dog days of summer are here. Seems like things are a bit slow lately…I only have a few links to share, in any case. But share I will…the lack of quantity does not impact their quality…