Derick Rethans’s¹ slides are a good MongoDB tutorial for PHP developers covering most of the API.

The how:

One brief note about architecture: since it’s impractical to simply query the activity of 500 friends, there are two general approaches for building scalable news feeds:

1. Fan-out on read (do these queries ahead of time and cache them)
2. Fan-out on-write (write follower-specific copies of every activity so when a given user asks for a feed you can retrieve it in one, simple query)

blog.waxman.me

And why Redis:

First off, why Redis? It’s fast, our data model allows us to store minimal data in each feed entry, and Redis’ data-types are pretty well suited for an activity feed. Lists might seem like an obvious choice and could work for a basic feed implementation, but we ended up using sorted sets for two reasons:

1. If you use a timestamp as the score parameter, you can really easily query for feed items based on time
2. You can easily get the union of multiple sorted sets in order to generate an aggregated “friend feed”

nleach.com

Then the code in Ruby and PHP

Original title and link: Activity Feeds with Redis (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Ori Pekelman discusses in two posts — here and here — the status of the various PHP libraries for Redis:

After looking at all of these I quickly turned to the C extension, Redisent looked nice but did not implement the new unified bulk protocol, and to be true, the code was a bit buggy. The others (Predis, Rediska ) seemed like bloatware, that capture the real essence of PHP (making complicated incoherent APIs) while missing that of Redis (Simple, Fast, Awsomeness).

As you can imagine such a comment generated some reactions and Ori followed up with a (not exactly scientific) benchmark:

While initially considering 6 PHP libraries (phpredis, Predis, Redis PHP bindings (deprecated), Redisent, Rediska), the benchmark didn’t include Rediska as the library is defining a too custom API for Redis.

Do you have a different experiences with any of these Redis PHP libraries?

Original title and link: Redis and PHP: What Library to use? (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Besides LAMP, you can now learn about LAP(hp)-CouchDB-:

PHP developers generally use MySQL, but the rise of NoSQL databases has opened up new options for creating web apps. CouchDB’s unique replication feature set and easy API make it a great fit for PHP developers looking to move into a NoSQL database.

Original title and link: CouchDB and PHP (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Jonathan Wage’s preso:

And I think I’ve read the Doctrine is now working on tightly integrating with CouchDB too.

Original title and link: Doctrine: MongoDB Object Document Mapper for PHP (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

Sort of ☞ todo.txt, but using MongoDB with ☞ Ruby or ☞ PHP:

Earlier this summer, we kicked off a series on MongoDB where the goal was to write a simple todo application using native MongoDB drivers and three of our favorite scripting languages.

Original title and link: MongoDB: A ToDo App with Ruby and PHP (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)