Introduction

MDB2 Description

PEAR MDB2 is a merge of the PEAR DB and Metabase php database abstraction layers.

It provides a common API for all support RDBMS. The main difference to most other DB abstraction packages is that MDB2 goes much further to ensure portability. Among other things MDB2 features:

• An OO-style query API

• A DSN (data source name) or array format for specifying database servers

• Datatype abstraction and on demand datatype conversion

• Portable error codes

• Sequential and non sequential row fetching as well as bulk fetching

• Ability to make buffered and unbuffered queries

• Ordered array and associative array for the fetched rows

• Prepare/execute (bind) emulation

• Sequence emulation

• Replace emulation

• Limited Subselect emulation

• Row limit support

• Transactions support

• Large Object support

• Index/Unique support

• Module Framework to load advanced functionality on demand

• Table information interface

• RDBMS management methods (creating, dropping, altering)

• RDBMS independent XML based schema definition management

• Altering of a DB from a changed XML schema

• Reverse engineering of XML schemas from an existing DB (currently only MySQL)

• Full integration into the PEAR Framework

• PHPDoc API documentation

Currently supported RDBMS:

• MySQL

• PostgreSQL

• Oracle

• Frontbase

• Querysim

• Interbase/Firebird

• MSSQL

• SQLite

• Others to follow soon.

Support resources

• API documentation