Taking a break from some of the design patterns tutorials they've been posting, DevShed shows how, in this new article to easily create a system to store the sessions for your users into a database versus the usual file system route.

There are many reasons to utilize sessions when creating a web-based application using PHP. Session information, by default, is stored in a file on your web server. But what if that becomes a problem? In this article, I'll talk about why you might want to move your PHP sessions to a database, and show you how to do it.

They start off looking at the limitations of normal session handling (when it comes to multiple web servers), making special note of the function that can make database session handling easy - session_set_save_handler. From there on out, the tutorial takes you through the setup of a SessionManager class and int implementation - including examples of reading, writing, and cleaning up data from expires sessions.