PHP 5 in Practice

14. Relational Databases In web environments, databases are as ubiquitous as blades of grass in a meadow. Web applications such as photo archives, blogs, podcasts, forums, retail sites, and portals are all driven by databases. As you might e...

14.1. Communicating with MySQL MySQL is one of the most popular databases used with PHP, and PHP 5 includes a new access library for itMySQLi, which stands for MySQL Improved. Both a functional interface library and an object-oriented class defini...

14.2. Communicating with Oracle Oracle is one of the oldest and most established database systems in use today. Hence, it has its share of idiosyncrasies. From PHP's point of view there are a few things to remember. Primarily, there is not a sin...

14.3. Communicating with PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is another open source relational database system often used by PHP programmers. It is a full-featured system and has a long history dating back to 1986. For a full description of the library, see htt...

14.4. Communicating with Sybase Sybase is a popular commercial database system that has fairly large penetration in the market. There are a few specific things to note when dealing with Sybase. First, Sybase does not have its own specific escape...

14.5. Communicating with Microsoft SQL Server At one point Microsoft's SQL Server shared a code base with Sybase, and therefore today they are still similar. For a full description of the library, see http://php.net/mssql. Listing 14.5.1 is the ...

14.6. Communicating with SQLite SQLite is a serverless database system included in PHP 5. With SQLite you can access local files as if they were databases and have a full set of standard SQL functions at your disposal. To learn more about SQLite...

14.7. Communicating with Databases Through ODBC ODBC is a database connection abstraction layer. It allows you to use a standard set of functions to communicate to any database that supports an ODBC connection. The ODBC interface on your machine...

14.8. Using an Abstraction Layer to Communicate with a Database (PDO) PHP 5.1 includes an inclusive abstraction object called PHP Data Objects (PDO). Using PDO you can communicate with many different types of databases. As of this writing, PDO s...

14.9. Implementing an SQLite Based Blog Blogs have become a popular method of producing content on the Web. Many different software packages can handle this for you; however, they are not difficult concepts to create yourself if you want. The li...