For years I have been trying to move my workplace onto open source software. And now the powers that be have heard me.
This morning I was asked how feasible it would be to move from Microsoft SQL/Cold Fusion to MySQL/PHP.
We have an opt-in subscription service with hundreds of thousands of addresses. Our current technology plan is to move to Cold Fusion Enterprise which uses multi-threading to send these messages out very, very quickly.
If I can show that PHP has similar capability then I'm pretty sure I get this place looking at Penguins, not Windows.
Any help with this matter is appreciated. Also, the next update will have nothing to do with technology. I promise.
The Day After
The office is a buzz as we're scrambling to prepare for our complete migration to LAMP (Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP). Everyone is excited and looking forward to learning new languages and processes. Half my staff is on the phones and the web looking for training in the next few weeks. I haven't seen movement like this in a while — good stuff.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment or email with help and guidance.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
Good move. If you get stuck, feel free to IM me.
It's worth mentioning that ColdFusion runs great on Linux. It also works great with MySQL.
Yes, I was going to say the same thing as Robert. You can have both worlds running at the same time (and, even further, if they really pushed you, you could also leave a Windows MS SQL server on the network and connect to it from the Linux box).
I knew this bookmark would come in handy!
Here's a link to a letter (and commentary) by a high-ranking Peruvian public official on why to make the switch to open source. The link is to metafilter.
Link to letter and commentary:
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/16838
(Metafilter is down temporarily and Google cache is all wonky, so I can't get you the actual link just yet. Sorry.)
Yes totally go with mySQL/PHP. I hate Microsoft SQL. It is so much easier to use PHP to pull up queries from the mySQL database. And Linux is naturally a better web hosting platform. Apache runs so much smoother on it and the Linux kerner is more difficult to hack...businesses tend to like that. Just look at IBM.
If you end up with php code attempting to send your subscription messages. One word of advice. "Sockets!". There are many ways to mail from php, some have more features, others are much faster. Even better might be to have some simple handler written in something even faster that php can just exec()
FYI we use php+postgres (because they had UTF8 support first). We still have a M$SQL db around but you can talk to that using php if you really have to. At one point it involved compiling in TDS, tabular data stream, and using the sybase libraries, but i think the newer php versions have M$ support.
Congratulations on moving to LAMP at work Greg, it's such a cozy place to be.
Just to let you know sending out hundreds of thousands of messages in PHP is not an easy task. I've maintained lists using PHP/MySQL that had over a million subscribers - it takes about a day to send out all of the messages.
A faster solution would be a multi-tier EZMLM solution. The idea is to load balance lists across multiple servers to pump out craploads of email in a relatively short time. EZMLM plugs into MySQL as well so you could manage the lists with PHP and then send out with EZMLM (of course the drawback is EZMLM doesn't do individualized emails).
Your site is very cute and retro looking.
Just as dog owners resemble their pets....et tu Greg.
Cristina, thanks for the compliment! It's now a part of the permanent collection found in the About section.
Might want to check out PHPList at http://tincan.co.uk/?lid=453. OpenSource mailing list management. Haven't used it personally, but a few sites with large numbers of members seem to be using it.
Good luck.