Simon Willison’s Weblog

Warp factor PHP

I’ve been working on a PHP application that can take an XTM formatted Topic Map and convert it in to relational data in MySQL, run queries on it and convert it back to an XTM later. My work on the initial parser has involved some pretty heavy duty processing, and the speed with which PHP and MySQL are handling the data I’m throwing at them is phenomenal. The classic Italian Opera Topic Map example weighs in over a megabyte of XML, but PHP is munching it up and spitting out (and executing) over 13,000 SQL queries in less than seven seconds.