Last Thursday (Feb. 28th) the company I work for hit a major milestone. Upon adding First MLS to our system we topped 1 trillion dollars worth of properties in out databases. This value is made up of the asking price for properties for sale throughout the nation in the 160 or so MLSs that we service. We were getting close to this mark last December, but a lot of properties dropped of the market on January first. Enough that our system totals dropped by over 60 billion dollars.

Now for the geeky bit. To track this number I wrote a php script which runs as a cron under the php-cli which queries every single property in our system. It’s written in such a way that most of the work is done by mysql, so it actually runs quite fast. Querying 2.7 million properties takes roughly 10 minutes.

For every property table in our system I use mysql to get a sum(), a min() and a max() for the listing price column. That information is then saved to an XML document so it can be read cross server for various applications. Generally when I write a script to parse this  XML I will use simpleXML to break it up and then load it’s values into a heap table. From there it’s easy and fast to run queries without having to wait the 10 minutes to query every property.

We still have at least 650 more MLSs in the US alone that we don’t yet service, so who knows what we might be able to hit.

Have you ever added up the cost of the software it takes to live like a web developer? I never really put 2 and 2 thousand together before because, I suppose, that when you buy it little by little you don’t realize how much your spending. Just for kicks (and because I woke up like 2 hour early this morning) I put together a list of all the software I sue at home and/or at work and then worked the plus button for a while. I nearly had a heart attack. My wallet is still being examined by the doctor but we’re hopeful it will be ok.

• Windows XP Professional: $300
• Adobe Creative Suite 2: $1200
• Dreamweaver: $400
• Microsoft Office 2003 (technically not needed for development, but necessary for office life): $500
• MS Visio 2003: $300

It’s almost to the point that I’d have to become a prostitute just to get enough cash together to be able to become a freelance programmer again. Then we get into issues of my pimp not liking my attitude and my Johns not wanting to hear about the latest AJAX hack I’ve found. I know there are Open Source alternatives to most of the products I listed (and I home I am a loyal Open Office user) but the usability of many of those free alternatives makes the prostitution option more appealing. For now I’ll just be glad that I don’t need to buy any of that software but I’m not getting rid of my fishnet stockings no matter how much my g/f wants me to.