Joseph Wynn

Anybody not using PDO should be using mysql_real_escape_string http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php

If your application is hitting the database enough to crash it then you need to optimise your queries for cacheability, and maybe even revisit the database design. You should probably also get a professional DB admin to set the database server up properly.

Rolling your own UUID-based system and throwing away JOINs is going to be a nightmare for maintainability and I'll bet it scales worse than a well-configured RDBMS.

Besides, any good ORM will take care of performance and caching for you. Look into something like Doctrine, which has caching built-in and is super smart when it comes to single big JOINs vs multiple smaller queries.

A much safer alternative is to use feature flags - http://code.flickr.net/2009/12/02/flipping-out/

Just a heads up: this method adds scroll bars to elements which are floated left and doesn't work at all for elements which are floated right.