This is an almost complete CakePHP component to create hierarchical reports.

It's not really canonical Cake, because it only works with MySQL.

This is a way to insert empty or empty-like rows into a list of "seats" that contains not only reservations, but a number saying how many seats a group of people have.

The goal is to remove all the bad fax numbers from a JBlast fax list. This applies to any situation where you want to remove one list of data from another list of data. Another way to say it is that you have a full list, and you're trying to remove a sublist from the full list.

The way you do it is by taking the full list, and then doing a JOIN that will add a column that identifies the rows that are present in the sublist. You can do this with a LEFT JOIN. A LEFT JOIN includes all the rows in the left table, in this case, the full list. It matches on a key in the right table, and when there's a match, columns from the right table are included; when there's no match, the columns are set to NULL.

The following image shows a left join in Access.

Here's a noob-to-noob optimization trick. Suppose you have a database table with, say, 200,000 records, and you regularly select on multiple criteria. The rule for selection is to put the most specific WHERE clause first, and the least specific last. The goal is to cut down the search set to something small, and then search through the smaller set. Get all the queries using this order, then create a composite index over the keys to speed up the search even more.

Here are some before and after shots, based on real queries (from sf-active):

select * from tb where display='t' and parent_id=0 and id > 198000 limit 0,30

After:

select * from tb where id > 198000 and parent_id=0 and display='t' limit 0,30

Been upgrading from an old Drupal 4.5 (aka Civicspace 82) to Drupal 5.1.

Dropping CiviCRM

I had to get rid of the unused civicrm tables. Installing it seemed like a good idea at the time, but no point of using it for a tiny campaign. Here's a script that will delete the tables. It's posted here because the InnoDB engine complains if you drop these in the wrong order, and violate some constraints.


drop table if exists `civicrm_activity`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_activity_history`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_activity_type`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_address`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_county`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_custom_option`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_custom_value`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_donation_page`;
drop table if exists `civicrm_email_history`;