Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database.

A few days ago I read an article on the internet where the writer claimed to get a 4000% performance improvement when not sorting data on the MySQL database, but in the PHP code. As if there are only two types of databases: relational and non-relational?

He has a point. 
A long...long time ago, there were no relational databases. There were just databases, these are nowadays called hierarchical databases. Indeed these were a lot faster (2-3X), but you had to write a lot more code to get the data out and indeed sort the data in the application (you retrieved rows one by one and had to traverse manually through the table/recordset/ database). 

A simple query like e.g. 'select bla from table a, table b where a.id = b.id order by a.id' could easily costs a few pages or procedures (sections) to write in a 3GL language.

However, 4000% improvement can't be true, I would fire the query developer or the DBA on the spot who set up the database.

Why a Corporate Enterprise Web Application experience is not likely to be build with an entry point Content Management System (e.g. the big three: Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal).

The difference

The difficulty comes with the number of techniques that seamlessly have to work together and the requirements that the corporate web application needs to meet. Especially the non-functional requirements play an important role in web development (non-functional requirements, or call them quality requirements if you like, are e.g. response times and security aspects).

Of course these requirements exist in other areas as well, but due to the surface where a corporate website operates in these are even more important.

Apple introduces the iPad 100 Page Edition.

This upgraded version really adds something to the market.

The Apple iPad is a gadget for a market where no market is. I still can't think of one reason why I would should by one. Perhaps the iPad 3H (version 3) when released.

This Movie is from the same website (FoD), its funny too: Hello