In an effort to help a colleague with FULLTEXT search troubles today, I tried to find out everything that could go wrong with setting up this search method on a table. My short research resulted in this checklist. Failure to comply with these checks will result in catastrophic failure :P

Today I faced a quite interesting problem, that originated from pure laziness. I’m developing a backend system for a quite complex database structure. Within this backend, an almost limitless amount of table views have to be created for the end user. Because I’m extremely lazy, and didn’t want to develop the html view code for each table view, I created a PHP html-table-generator-class, which takes a mysql_result_set as parameter, and outputs the html table in string format.

This method works great, unless for some cases, where a value in the query has to be substituted by a user readable value. A boolean is a good example of such a value.