What is your prefered: PDO and MySQLi?

[Ansego]

I've always used MySQL / MySQLi and never got into PDO, but as I read the posts I am seeing more and more PDO being promoted, is it better? what are the benefits? what's your thoughts?

[Ansego]

Found this: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/pdo-vs-mysqli-which-should-you-use--net-24059

[EffakT]

I used to always use MySQL, then moved to MySQLi and used that for everything, until I started learning OOP, in which I used PDO.

Now, I only use PDO (mainly because it is required for my course).

[Clarkey]

PDO is great because it add an abstraction to the database, regardless of the database server type.

 

For instance, if you use mysqli functions throughout your program, and then somebody else deploys the program but they are using postgres database server, then they would have to change every single function that interacts with a database for it to work. But, with PDO, they can just change one variable, and ta daaa!

[trq]

PDO is great because it add an abstraction to the database, regardless of the database server type.

 

For instance, if you use mysqli functions throughout your program, and then somebody else deploys the program but they are using postgres database server, then they would have to change every single function that interacts with a database for it to work. But, with PDO, they can just change one variable, and ta daaa!

PDO is not a database abstraction. It provides you the same API across databases, but it does nothing to protected you against differences in syntax between those systems. For that you would need to use something like Doctrine's DBAL on top of PDO.

[sKunKbad]

I like PDO because of the named placeholders, but I use Doctrine DBAL, which has some bonuses over plain PDO. DBAL's documation is nice.

 

Check out DBAL's introduction:

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/latest/reference/introduction.html