sql – Enavigo

Enabling Oracle OCI8 PHP Extension on OS X Snow Leopard

My current project involves using PHP with an Oracle database. Oracle apparently embraces PHP warmly and as such supports an open source database driver for the environment called OCI8. As a Mac user I was looking to use OS X's built-in Apache and PHP setup, which like many PHP installations does not have the Oracle OCI8 driver installed or enabled. It took me some time and research to get it up and running. I was using Oracle Express, a limited capability, free-ish version of Oracle's database. Oracle Express was installed on a separate Windows machine as it cannot run or be installed on Snow Leopard. I also assume that you enabled PHP in your Apache configuration (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf) and have a /etc/php.ini by copying it from /etc/php.ini.default.

OCI8 relies on OS X having several client libraries and tools from Oracle installed on OS X. For most intents and purposes download the 64-bit version of the following files under the title "Version 10.2.0.4 (64-bit)":

Registration is required for all downloads.

SQLite ORDER BY does not work on integers: time for an index

My current project uses SQLite as it is really the only game in town on iOS. SQLite indexes provide an incredible performance boosts when you are dealing with large datasets. They apparently play a crucial role when it comes to something of a foregone conclusion in other databases – sorting.

What stumped my colleagues and I was that we had a database table where one of the columns had an INT (and also tested using an INTEGER) type (and yes – they are all NUMERIC to SQLite) – and ORDER BY kept returning incorrectly sorted results. According to this post on Stack Overflow, when you have a SQLite query that uses the ORDER BY, it may rely on temporary tables. Those in turn 'confuse' the database when it runs the query to sort your table.

The answer – add an index. Something as simple as

CREATE INDEX index_name ON table_name ( NAME_OF_COLUMN_TO_SORT ASC );

Once you add it – you are, well – sorted out.