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November 04, 2004
Comments on PDO
I've received a few emails from various users of PHP asking for my opinion on the PDO extension. Written by Wez, who for all I've ever seen is a rather intelligent programmer, my initial impression is that it's purpose is to unify the many database functionalities to one extensible interface. Admirable goal in my opinion. Stig and I had talked about this years ago and obviously not done anything with the concept. Partly because as I thought about it more, it seems implementing such a beast (to me at least) would be re-inventing the ODBC wheel (unified abstracted database accessor functionality that is industry supported).
Not to toot ODBCs horn, because my initial guess is PDO works significantly faster when utilizing native driver connections, and it probably also works faster in ODBC mode by not using a dynamic cursor like the ext/ODBC does. In any case my general opinion is it looks nice, seems to work, isn't documented very well (yet), and I have no idea what the general long term goal is for it's development.
The lingering question is PDO going to split the PHP database support, attempt to nullify the current generation of extensions, or is it going to just peacefully co-exist? I have a feeling it's original intention was to be a C style system, but I see it becoming more of an A+B case as time goes on.
Posted by Dan at November 4, 2004 11:18 AM