PHP + Databases -> FAQ

A view days ago I offered to write a faq about connecting php to databases (IIS). I am just preparing that faq and there are some open questions someone might be able to answer. When I wrote that email I hadn't managed to connect via odbc to a database with windows. Someone on the list gave me the hint to connect via the Open Link ODBC driver. And in fact, it works. But now I want to understand why. (By the way there is the possibility to give the IUSR_... administrator rights and simply use Windows ODBC. This has two dramatic drawbacks. First of all, the implementation isn't thread safe and therefore leads to unpredictable problems in an environment like iis. Second, it is inacceptable to give the IUSR... administrator rights in a production system). My second question concerns the performance under special circumstances of the open link odbc driver. Perhaps someone has some experience with that. Because openlink does not support interbase directly I connected to the database via the odbc driver shipped with the interbase client software. OPENLINK ODBC --[ODBC]--> WINDOWS ODBC --[INTERBASE ODBC DRIVER]--> Interbase DB My feeling is that this isn't the fastest way. Would be great if someone who knows it better can drop some words about that kind of configurations. That's it so far Regards Gerhard