Well, that's half PHP's problem. The other half is that it had very little coherent design in the beginning, which resulted in idiosyncratic an confusing syntax. It focused on a few things Perl did, while ignoring the important context they were housed within (for one, the whole idea of context as Perl implements it, for another being consistent within your own rules).
Perl, as confusing as it can seem, has fairly consistent rules that it follows. Learning those and keeping them in mind will generally let you intuit how something is expected to work.
"It should be something that any clerk can handle and that doesn't become obsolete."
This is an important statement. in that it is a reasonable goal, but nearly impossible.
Even using word, once one gets past a simple document, and starts having TOC, index, etc. and is "four five-inch binders" full of pages, then not just ANY CLERK will be able to maintain the document.
How elitist have we become that the top comment says staff will become confused by the term "sprint" or using Microsoft word, the most ubiquitous document writing software in existence. Would I use it? No. Would I suggest it here? Yes. I mean we are talking about PRINTING a 500 page document and carrying it around so we can't reach for the stars here, but I will grant them 2nd grade english and 5th grade typing proficiency.
Okay, invoking Word vs LaTex automatically makes your argument a straw man. I would have compared word to e.g. Adobe InDesign.
It has been my experience that while almost everybody can create a passable document in Word, something technical/government-ish with 500 pages and all of the publishing accouterments that come with a document of size, purpose, and complexity, you're getting into specialist territory, and almost all of the DTP specialists I know start by importing Word files in to InDesign.
I had a class called "Introduction to file processing" that was basically "here's how you manage your data files," and taought us about the evolution from sequential access, to ISAM, to VSAM. Ended up working in RDMBS/SQL but it was a fascinating class - despite the assignments being in FORTRAN.
flash cookies are less well known to people. Even the casual "privacy conscious" web user tend to be unaware that flash drop its own flash cookies that don't clear with the browsers "clear cookies" function.
No. Without any indication that the value in that column is unique the query engine must read the entire table in order to insure that it has found every row that meets the search criteria.
But the original query includes "limit 1". Why is it necessary to find every row meeting the search criterion? Only one will be returned, and without an ORDER BY clause it doesn't matter which one.
You appear to be assuming that the limit is applied while fetching tuples, rather than while filtering the tuple set after fetch.
It occurs to me that if you handle LIMIT during fetch, you'll add complexity the fetch, and might only see run time gains in the cases where the number of desired rows is small.
If a column contains unique data it should be marked as such in whatever way your RDBMS requires (e.g. UNIQUE constraint and/or UNIQUE index)
