Catching bugs that only show up in Prod

Hi Cyril,

Thanks for this very clear and concisely written article. I have used PhpEd almost from the day it first appeared and find the remote debugging feature invaluable for resolving issues that can still crop up on production servers even after code has passed all tests in dev and test.

Another tool to consider for your arsenal is dbForge Studio (for MySQL in my case). This PC based DB client has some very useful features, such as being able to compare databases or individual tables and synchronise if desired.

Personally, I like to connect the PhpEd remote debugger and the dbForge DB client through an SSH tunnel for security. It's pretty simple to do this in both tools.

Nick Weavers

Thanks Nick. That is a good point raised on SSH. For real life implementations it is important to secure all remote connections, which are supported in PHPEd with SFTP and SSH Tunnelling. Is dbForge fast on the wire?

Well it obviously depends on the speed of your Internet connection. On my home broadband I get around 16Mbs down and 450Kbs up. It's pretty fast on this. It's like an SQL IDEA too, so you can develop your queries in the built in editor and see the results in a window right underneath, or error message if sql not correct. It even has a debugger to help you develop sql procedures. Worth checking out.

Yes, it always helps to have a good environment for the whole stack you are working with. If the tool complements PHPEd well that will be great for Engineers working in Remote projects. On the MySQL end the speed issues I think are mostly when you do direct connection to the MySQL server through TCP so SSH a good idea.