In a new post today Courtney Robinson shows how the combination of Cassandra, PHPcassa and CodeIgniter can be used to create a large scale PHP application in five minutes .

I’m working on a new project, migrating an existing site using custom code with a very monolithic design on top of MySQL. Design goals : Implement all the same functionality using a manageable framework with a small footprint on a distributed NoSQL database. Small footprint? I’m thinking Code Igniter (CI)...Distributed NoSQL (my favorite part)? I’m thinking Apache Cassandra!!!

The basic idea was to have the CodeIgniter database object (the $this->db) available but still allow the application access to the Cassandra database as well. PHPcassa was the answer. One created configuration file and a custom database library later and the tool was implemented into the CodeIgniter structure.

On the Pressflow wiki there's a handy guide to getting PHP up and working with the Cassandra, the Apache Project's distributed database solution. (Note: Pressflow is Drupal-related, but this tutorial isn't specific to that.)

The guide walks you through the steps you'll need to build the Thrift client (with a list of a few dependencies) and build the PHP extension using this install. With the module built, they help you change the php.ini to load the shared module and include the commands you'll need to start up the Cassandra server. There's also a link to a sample script you can use to test out the full installation.

If you're having trouble making the connection, read through the comments for some common problems from other users.