New Contest

A new contest is up! Happy Coding!

The winner of the "Back to the Mazes" contest will be posted tomorrow evening....

i'm readin that book right now

(the one in the new contest)

IMHO, it's one of the best books on the subject (at least I liked it most).
Could anyone suggest other books on PHP/DBMS?
Thanks in advance.

Matt, what's the memory limit on the servers you'll be using? Hopefully I'm not giving too much of my strategy away, but like most puzzles of this sort, efficiently solving it often requires large amounts of memory.

I will tweak the memory limit per a script up to 32MB....

Interesting contest indeed.
I have some questions.

- Is it a requirement that the script runs on both linux and windows?

-I need more information on the php interpreter: Cofigure string, setings in php.ini (windows & linux versions) and output from phpinfo().

- Since you don't specify which extentions/modules are allowed, should I assume none or any? Relevant modules are: bc math, gmp, dba/dbm, dbase, bzip2, zlib, zip

both windows and linux? yes. your code should be portable.

ini settings? phpinfo() page? your code should be portable.

bc math - no
gmp - no
dba/dbm - sure
dbase - sure
bzip2 - sure
zlib - sure
zip - sure

I am going to spend a considerable amount of time on this little project. I naturally enter to win or to lose to a better opponent. I am going to provide the shortest path and optimise for speed.
I will be rather annoyed if I lose because you have compiled PHP with funny options or done strange things to php.ini.
I must be able to replicate the testing enviroment. phpinfo contains a lot of useful information, including version numbers of allowed modules. Also I request the configure string so I can see ALL the allowed modules.
I do not find it unreasonable to request a properly defined specification.

You are missing the point here. And that point is:

Your code should be portable.

It is as simple as that. You are on a level playing field. You know the same information that everyone else knows. I make every effort to make every script run.

Part of this challenge is to write good code. And good code should be portable to other systems.

You can trust that I have not compiled php with "funny options" or "done strange things" to php.ini. I am running standard installations of PHP. If you have questions about a particular module, please feel free to ask. I have always been happy to answer questions of the sort.

And to go a little deeper on why I won't provide a phpinfo page or compile string...because I run the code on multiple machines. Each of the scripts normally is run on three different machines. These three different machines may be tweaked in slightly different ways. Does it affect the operation of portable code? No.

Please provide information on the dba module:

gdbm version - same on Windows/Linux?

Same for ndbm, db2, db3 and cdb?

Any preferred dba handler or can I chose freely?

Please ignore last message.

The db3 handler is the standard handler on Windows and is also included in the RedHat rpm.

And gee, it is very fast.

When will the next contest be?

I will have the next contest posted by the end of the week (hopefully sooner). Life has just been very hectic recently and judging the last contest is still first priority