I was really pleased to come across the “SQL Antipatterns Stirke Back” presentation recently, which discusses common mistakes with SQL database design. It gives some really good advice on how best to design databases to avoid these issues. I’ve certainly made some of the mistakes mentioned, and I’m sure I’ll be referring back to this presentation again and again!

At work we’re experiencing some fairly rapid growth, and our single production server is starting the feel the strain. I’ve been doing a lot of investigation into how we can scale the site, and thankfully there is lots of information out there.

The “Do you Scale” presentation I saw at PHP London a couple of months ago gave a good high level overview of scalability issues, and included some useful techniques to help you scale.

I think I’ve found the ultimate scalability presentation though: “Real World Web: Performance & Scalability”. The 189 slides contained within this presentation cover almost everything I’ve read elsewhere, and it’s packed full of practice advice!

Knowledge of design patterns can be really useful when designing software. If you don’t know what a design pattern is, then from Wikipedia:

In software engineering, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

Design patterns were made famous by the book Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, written by the Gang of Four, or GoF. Although I’ve never got round to reading it, it is fairly high on my to-read list!

Despite not having read the GoF book I’m still aware of some of the more common design patterns, such as the singleton, factory, and iterator patterns. Such is the nature of patterns that I’ve probably used some without even being aware,after all they are just common reusable software designs.

I recently came across an excellent website that gives details on all of the GoF design patterns, including descriptions, UML diagrams, and sample code in Java, C++ and PHP! The site isn’t good enough to displace the GoF book from my to-read list, but I’m sure I’ll find it useful for the mean time.