In this new post to his site Kevin Schroeder has shared a helpful hint around the MongoDB library and excluding fields from the results of a query.

I am using the mongodb/mongodb library for a project of mine. The API seems fairly different from the old PECL library and it also came with some other, albeit unexpected, baggage. [...] One of the practices I’ve heard about Mongo is to get Mongo to do as much as it can, but not to worry too much about complicated joins and such as you would in SQL. In other words, don’t shy away from bringing data into the application to do some processing. That was the practice I followed, which worked fine up until my data size started to increase.

He started seeing some major performance issues when his data set grew to a significant size (50% of the response time). He went searching for a solution, tried MapReduce but eventually came upon an optional parameter letting him tell the Mongo DB to omit a value (or values) from the result set. Using this he dropped 7.5 seconds off of his wall clock time.

On the This Programming Thing blog there's a recent post showing you how to define your own "sniff" settings for the popular PHP_CodeSniffer tool. The codesniffer lets you define standards that need to be in place for all code in your application and notifies you of violations.

At Zimco, we’ve started working on standardizing our coding but we ran into a little problem while we tried to automate the process of making sure our code adhered to that standard. [...] I think we get into our own way of doing things and everything else is wrong. This code makes me feel irrationally angry (so angry I’m having a hard time not fixing it…). Ultimately, the best way to fix these kinds of formatting problems is to sit down and discuss what’s best and have everyone stick to the same set of standards.

They talk some about the place for PSR in coding standards (specifically PSR-2) and the fact that there's already "sniffs" provided to check against those rules. However, they point out that running this against a non-PSR-2 codebase can be a mess and show you how to customize your own standard to more match your current state. They use an XML configuration file to update the tab width setting to four spaces and then apply the PSR-2 standards. They also show how to exclude certain rules and mention a handy plugin you can use in Sublime Text to keep your code within standards.

In a recent post to his blog Mike Lively looks at some improvements that he's worked up for the popular PHP unit testing software - PHPUnit - in regards to its filters.

I have finally gotten some time to do some long awaited work on PHPUnit. The first on my agenda was a small improvement to filtering. This was related to ticket #526. Essentially I added the ability to do both white list and black list filtering.

Besides the Include methods you can add to the data set's filtering, you can also add in Exclude filters to remove the data you don't want in the set. They can also be combined to customize your data set to your heart's content.