I just learned that I’ll be presenting at the 2008 installment of the DC PHP Conference (in Washington DC, oddly enough). I’m excited about the prospect.

With their abundant availability both in volatile and permanent storage (i.e., RAM and hard-disks), sometimes I think the value of bits is lost on more recent developers, especially those that write in a very high-level language, like, say, PHP. The past few weeks I’ve been working very closely with some data analysts in our company — in particular, I’ve been compiling some very large tables (think nearly 1 billion rows per month) into “views” (technically, they’re completely new tables) that are much more manageable.

Tonight, mostly as an exercise in futility, I began looking at some of the foreign keys stored in the gargantuan tables. One of them in particular links to a table that currently contains (oddly enough) 256 rows. It grows very, very slowly. Currently the column is a long integer: 4 bytes. Imagine for a minute that we replaced that with what MySQL calls a small integer, or 2 bytes. Last month’s table was in the neighborhood of 900,000,000 rows, times 2, divided by 1024… That’s something just shy of 2 GIGAbytes that we’ve saved. (Never mind that there are about 4 other foreign keys this could also be applied to).

Every byte adds up, folks. Save ‘em while you can.

(Some might call this inconvenient math. I’m not quite that unscrupulous.)

I’d like you to meet my new coworker. We just started working with together yesterday (Friday), but we’re getting along famously. I’ve found that bouncing my code off him is increasing my productivity immensely, and — this might sound a little weird — I just can’t stop looking at him.

Forget the lame attempt at humor. Yes, that’s a Dell 24″ LCD. I’m quite excited about it, if you couldn’t tell. Makes me feel important or something.