Tag Archives: php

JPEF Magic!

Posted on by
Reply

Links to the code first!

Github: http://github.com/timbotron/JPEF-Magic

What is JPEF Magic, you ask?

JPEF (Javascript, PHP, Email Form) Magic is a package which handles email forms in an elegant and simple manner. Essentially, it lets you add email forms to your site and deploy addition email forms down the road much quicker then creating each one from scratch.

Notable features..

  • Consolidation; instead of validation and post-processing on each form page, handled with one file
  • Email generated has full text from questions on form
  • Settings for email processing (Email Subject, From, etc) are handled in hidden inputs on form
  • After success, passes all the email body to the ‘on success’ page you’ve set up
  • Allows you to have one “Form submitted successfully” page, with the users info displayed.

Why did I make it?

I come across this need all the time. I always think, “Oh I’ll just throw a form together.” but after you take care of the php to mail it, error checking, it does take time. Couple that with the fact I hate using the name value in emails as the question. I wanted a way to just have the exact language of the question on the form be what was included in the email, with minimal duplication by me. Hence, JPEF Magic was born.

Check out the demo at: http://lab.citracode.com/jpef_magic/

Date-storing tests in MySQL; Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

The results are in. First, there was a little thing I forgot about when describing the test to you earlier. Namely, storage size. The amount of storage required is also another thing to think about.

The relevant sizes of MySQL data types:

  • DATE: 3 bytes
  • INT: 4 bytes

Looking at my 3 ideas, one should be thrown out right away. Having three integers, even reducing them to 2 TINYINT’s (1 byte) and 1 SMALLINT (2 bytes), we are still talking 4 bytes, and thats with a lot of extra complexity. So that was out.

I generated a dataset with a little over 7 million rows, with data looking like:

[sourcecode language="sql"]
mysql> SELECT * FROM crunchme LIMIT 10;
+————+————+———-+——–+———+——-+
| idcrunchme | a_date | tim_date | a_year | a_month | a_day |
+————+————+———-+——–+———+——-+
| 12111 | 2009-01-01 | 20090101 | 2009 | 1 | 1 |
| 12112 | 2011-03-03 | 20110303 | 2011 | 3 | 3 |
| 12113 | 2008-11-19 | 20081119 | 2008 | 11 | 19 |
| 12114 | 2009-07-16 | 20090716 | 2009 | 7 | 16 |
| 12115 | 2008-10-19 | 20081019 | 2008 | 10 | 19 |
| 12116 | 2009-04-22 | 20090422 | 2009 | 4 | 22 |
| 12117 | 2009-04-03 | 20090403 | 2009 | 4 | 3 |
| 12118 | 2011-06-10 | 20110610 | 2011 | 6 | 10 |
| 12119 | 2009-06-01 | 20090601 | 2009 | 6 | 1 |
| 12120 | 2008-08-24 | 20080824 | 2008 | 8 | 24 |
+————+————+———-+——–+———+——-+
[/sourcecode]

Let’s see what happens when we run some queries!

[sourcecode language="sql"]
mysql>SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE count(idcrunchme) FROM crunchme WHERE tim_date >= 20100101 AND tim_date <= 20110514;

+——————-+
| count(idcrunchme) |
+——————-+
| 2388242 |
+——————-+
1 row in set (2.96 sec)

mysql>SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE count(idcrunchme) FROM crunchme WHERE a_date >= ’2010-01-01′ AND a_date<=’2011-05-14′;
+——————-+
| count(idcrunchme) |
+——————-+
| 2388242 |
+——————-+
1 row in set (3.61 sec)
[/sourcecode]

So, the integer solution is faster, by roughly 22% at this level. However, here is where it gets fun. It is larger, by one byte. Also, it will mean having to add extra code when I’m working with dates in my CodeIgniter app.

After all this, I am going to go with the MySQL DATE type. I was surprised to see the time difference being so low.

I hope this helps someone else out!

Date-storing tests in MySQL; Part 1

Posted on by
Reply

Data, what fun it is!

My issue is this, I’m working on a web app, which uses CodeIgniter, with a MySQL DB. My question was, since all I am storing for a date time is the year, month and day, what is the best way to do this? I’m going to be making a lot of queries like “select all entries from user bob from March to May of this year”.

As I see it, there are several options:

  1. Use the DATE data type in MySQL, which stores as “YYYY-MM-DD”.
  2. Generate 3 attributes, each an integer, one “year”, one “month”, and one “day”.
  3. My new idea, to store it as an integer, in a “YYYYMMDD” format. It will allow for decent queries, since the hierarchy of time still works. (May still comes before March, 20110301 < 20110501).
  4. Use the time function in php, which returns the number of seconds since 1970. A lot of people go this route, but I think it’s crap because in 2038 it will restart, causing issues . Y2K38 people! I’m going to pretend you didn’t even bring this up.

I’m writing a script that will generate about 10.000.000 rows of data, each with every date recording option I mentioned above, then I will make some pretty bar graphs and we shall see what we shall see.

My guestimate is that my integer idea (“YYYYMMDD”) will be the fastest, but let’s see.