In this post I will do something similar [to this previous post] for accessing Windows Azure Blob Storage from PHP. This won't be a deep-dive into Windows Azure Blob Storage, but it will be a "how to get started with the Microsoft_WindowsAzure_Storage_Blob class (which is part of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP)"-type post.

He talks about how these blob containers are stored on the Azure side and what kind of access controls they come with. This graph might help sort it all out. From there he shows you how to use the PHP SDK to connect to the service, make a new container (with an ACL) and doing all of the usual operations with a blob - uploading, downloading, streaming, deleting and listing the blobs currently available.

One increasingly common use of the cloud is storage for BLOBs (binary large objects) such as videos, applications, and even website images. Businesses use cloud storage to streamline operations. In his five-minute Internet.com video, Jason Gilmore uses the Zend Framework's Zend_Service_WindowsAzure component to demonstrate the fundamental concepts behind storing BLOBs within the Windows Azure cloud.

They'll show you how to create a blob storage containers, upload some data into it and pull the data back out. They also touch on working with the permissions on Azure so your script can access it correctly.

n my phpMyAdmin installation, version 3.1.1, none of the old style config settings [...] had any effect, and the solution was terribly elusive. "view blob", "show blob", "display blob", all that Google suggested were people asking the same question, at various ages of the internet.

Finally, after wading through negative comments of forums and not getting much help at all, Matthias dug into the source and found a session variable that can be set to true and the content magically appears.

I really don't know why, or what is going on, but after spending hours trying various code permutations I'm just not getting anywhere. I tried asking on php_general to no avail, so I consider this blog entry my last ditch attempt to get someone to shed some light on this issue before I give-in and ditch PDO for good.

His mission was to store an image in the database, but everything he tried just didn't seem to work out. After partial image storage and parameters being ignored, he's still at a loss as to how to get his (seemingly) simple quest solved. The only comment so far, though, hasn't seemed to help much - he's even opened a bug report upon Wez Furlong's request.