Gonzalo Ayuso has a tutorial posted to his site showing you how to create a PHP application on a SAP platform that includes PostgreSQL and Redis via Cloud Foundry.

Keeping on with my study of SAP’s cloud platform (SCP) and Cloud Foundry today I’m going to build a simple PHP application. This application serves a simple Bootstrap landing page. The application uses a HTTP basic authentication. The credentials are validated against a PostgreSQL database. It also has a API to retrieve the localtimestamp from database server (just for play with a database server). I also want to play with Redis in the cloud too, so the API request will have a Time To Live (ttl) of 5 seconds. I will use a Redis service to do it.

He then walks you through the process of setting up both the platform and the application:

• creating the services in cloud foundry
• create our application (with either Silex or Lumen)
• built out the features
• running the application locally for testing
• connecting to the cloud servers for PostgreSQL and Redis
• set up logging
• set up basic authorization

Full code and configuration is included for each step of the way (with Lumen examples included because Silex is "dead").

Ruslan Karimov has written up a post for the 4xxi.com blog covering the use of custom types with Symfony and Doctrine to implement features specific to your database of choice.

ORMs are great. In theory, they insure you against potential changes in your RDBMS and offer an easy plug’n’play solution for integration your domain code with database. In practice, however, since ORMs have to be compatible with all major vendors, their possibilities are often limited. Perks and tricks of specific RDBMS are left out.

One of such perks is so-called range types in PostgreSQL. There are plenty of cases when range types are applicable, but people (in my experience) often stick to old solution with two separate DATETIME columns. Last time I asked a fellow developer about the reason behind it and they said: ‘I use Doctrine in my project, and Doctrine does not support it’. So here we are.

He starts with a brief introduction to a custom type in Doctrine and a ranged type in PostgreSQL. He then shows how to create a custom "DateReangeType" to work with the ranged types and how add it to your Symfony configuration as a custom type. He ends the post with an example of it in use in an entity and in the client code making the database request. Full code can be found in this Github repository.

Rob Allen has continued his look at running a PHP application on Bluemix via Cloud Foundry with a new post showing how to use a PostgreSQL database on the platform.

Having successfully deployed a PHP application to Cloud Foundry, I needed a PostgreSQL database for persistent storage. I found Lorna Mitchell's Connecting PHP to MySQL on Bluemix helpful and this article expands on that information.

I want to create a cloud-based PostgreSQL database and connect it to Laravel's Eloquent in a Cloud Foundry application. This is how to do it.

He starts off by showing how to create the database instance on the Cloud Foundry platform via their command-line tool. Next he shows how to bind the database service to the application instance and get the credentials you'll need to connect from your application. Finally he moves over to the PHP side and shows how to configure Eloquent to connect to the database service using these credentials and make a sample query.

Gonzalo Ayuso has posted a quick tutorial to his site showing you how to work with Foreign Data Wrappers on your PostgreSQL database in PHP. If you're not familiar with the data wrappers functionality, you can find out more on the PostgreSQL wiki.

PostgreSQL is more than a relational database. It has many cool features. Today we’re going to play with Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW). The idea is crate a virtual table from an external datasource and use it like we use a traditional table.

He gives an example of a simple RESTful service with a Silex application serving up a set of user data (names). He then switches over to the PostgreSQL side and shows how to create the data wrapper and set up the mapping of it to the REST server's location. With that set up you can then select from the data returned as if it were a normal table with a slight caveat - filtering (like with where) must be done server side, not via the SQL statement.

On NetTuts.com they've posted a tutorial showing you how to create a real-time chat system using Laravel 5, Modulus and Pusher (with a PostregSQL backend).

In this tutorial, I will show you how to implement a real-time chat application with Laravel 5, PostgreSQL, and Pusher. Then we will deploy this application to Modulus together. We will use Laravel 5 for the back-end service, HTML5 and jQuery for a simple front-end application, PostgreSQL for the database, and Pusher for real-time communication between the server and clients.

They start with the scenario they want to solve and a look at the overall architecture of the solution. Then they start setting up the software and services needed to bring it all together:

• installing a fresh copy of Laravel (as a project)
• setting up a new database using the ElephantSQL service
• creating a Pusher account and the credentials you'll need for the application
• creating an Nginx configuration for the Modulus setup

Next comes the design of the application, creating the models for message data (author, content, etc) and the simple controller to handle the requests. They show how to configure the connection to Pusher and build the routes for getting, listing and saving messages. Finally they create the view complete with Javascript to connect it to Pusher and transfer messages back and forth. All that's left then is the deployment using the modulus command line tool (installed via npm).

On the bitExpert blog they've continued their "Think About It" series of posts looking at optimizations that can be made to different technologies in their stack to increase performance. In this third part of the series they focus in on the changes made to help speed things up with the PostgreSQL database backend.

This article is the last of a three-part series and describes how we optimized the persistence process of bulk data in our code in combination with PostgreSQL. Make sure you covered the first article about how we tweaked PHPExcel to run faster while reading Excel and CSV files and the second article about how we optimized our data processing and reached performance improvements tweaking our code.

They work from the example code provided at the end of part two and update the "update" handling to optimize it a bit. By default it executes an update query for each record so, instead, they modified it to perform a bulk update with an "update from values" format. They could then migrate to a "save all" handler with the complete set of records to save.

On the DigitalOcean community blog they've posted a guide to setting up a LEPP server (Linux, Nginx, PHP and PostgreSQL) on a CentOS 7 instance (not specific to their own platform either, can be applied anywhere).

In this tutorial, we will create a simple web application in a two-tier architecture. Our base operating system for both nodes will be CentOS 7. The site will be powered by an Nginx web server running PHP code that talks to a PostgreSQL database. Instead of adopting a "top-down" approach seen in other LAMP or LEMP tutorials, we will use a "ground-up" approach: we will create a database tier first, then the web server and then see how the web server can connect to the database. We will call this configuration a LEPP (Linux, Nginx, PHP, PostgreSQL) stack.

They create a two-tier setup that involves the use of two CentOS systems (with examples from their own hosting options) and walk you through:

• Installing PostgreSQL
• Configuring PostgreSQL
• Updating the Database Server Firewall
• Creating and Populating the Database
• Installing Nginx
• Updating the Web Server Firewall
• Configuring Nginx
• Installing PHP
• Configuring PHP
• Creating the Web Application

It seems like a lot of steps but all of the necessary commands and configuration updates are included in each step so it's basically a copy and paste kind of walk-through.

Dan Barrett has written up an excellent guide to setting up a LAMP stack on Debian from the ground up. It includes all the commands, configuration changes and screenshots of the interface you'll need.

Setting up a test environment can be a tricky thing when you compile PHP from scratch. As others have mentioned in the past, installations from Aptitude (and the like) lag behind which can quickly put your test environment out of date. Pulling inspiration from Juan Treminio and Brandon Savage, who both wrote excellent articles on setting up PHP from scratch. I like to keep my options open when developing which left both of those articles lacking a few features and extensions that I’d like to have bundled with PHP.

He guides you through a (detailed) process to get the following set up and running:

• Debian itself (GUI installer)
• Network configuration
• Installation of Apache
• both PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Other software including ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick
• PHP 5.5 (with several extensions of its own)

On the ZetCode.com site there's a five part tutorial posted about getting your PHP application up and running on a PostgreSQL database (updated on the 4th).

This is a PHP tutorial for the PostgreSQL database. It covers the basics of PostgreSQL programming with PHP. The examples were created and tested on Linux. [...] PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It is a multi-user, multi-threaded database management system. It runs on multiple platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. PostgreSQL is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.

The chapters guide you through every step you'll need:

• An introduction to PostgreSQL and getting it and PHP support installed (with the php5-pgsql package)
• Example code showing how to extract data from your tables
• Working with images and storing their data in a table
• Pulling out the metadata from the database, things like number of rows returned and table information
• Transactions and database-side processing

New on PHPBuilder.com there's a tutorial from Leidago Noabeb about using the PDO functionality that comes installed on many PHP platforms out there to access just about any database you might need to work work. This includes technology like MySQL, DB2, SQLite and PostgreSQL.

PHP Data Objects, or "PDO" as it is commonly known, is a lightweight database abstraction layer that is arguably the best, at least in terms of speed. A great deal of this speed is owing to the fact that the PDO extension was compiled with C/C++. The extension became available in PHP5, and as with any other database abstraction layer, its aim is to provide a uniform interface to access a variety of databases. This is also a way for developers to create portable code for a variety of platforms.

The tutorial shows you how to find the enabled PDO connection types for your installation (and where to go if you have access to turn more on or off). They show an example connection - in this case, to a MySQL database - and how to run a query or two using this new resource.