Pro PHP Programming

C H A P T E R  8

Database Integration II

In this chapter, we will see how to work with a fully-fledged RDBMS system, MySQL. Then, we will examine two database abstraction layers, PDO and ADOdb. At the end of the chapter, we will show you how to utilize the Sphinx text search engine.

With MySQL database, there are several PHP extensions from which to choose. The most frequently used is the MySQL extension. This extension is quite old and has no object orientation because it has existed since PHP4 and MySQL 4. It also lacks some important features, such as bind variables. There is a much newer extension, MySQLi, which will be covered in this chapter. It is worth mentioning that the old, procedural MySQL extension is still the most frequently ...