Re: DB Abstraction Layer - PHP

Hello Jamie, On 11-Oct-00 13:23:24, you wrote: >My thoughts so far are that phpDB is going to be my best choice. It should >be fast and easy to implement although it doesn't have nearly the number of >features as the other two listed. The other features are nice but it looks >like there is a great amount of overhead involved to just learn the syntax >for them (especially Metabase) although it might pay off in the end. Has >anyone used these solutions? Can you suggest any others? I know phpLib has >some sort of abstraction layer but I am somewhat confused about phpLib's >role now that PHP4 has been adopted. Can someone clue me in on phpLib's >abstraction layer (and possibily other features I'm missing)? Thanks for >your help. If you want to use a database abstraction package to develop real database independent Web applications I suggest that you reconsider to use Metabase. Of course that's not because I developed it, but because it really isolates you from having to handle things that are vary a lot between databases. Think just for instance in date fields. Each DBMS has its way to format date field values. If you are going to handle the different formats of date values to be sent or received from the database server, your applications will no longer ne database independent. Metabase handles that and much more for you. Besides database access, Metabase also handles for you database installation, ie, creation of tables, fields, indexes and sequences in such way that you don't have to bother learning from each DBMS documentation how to represent each datatype you want to use in your tables. You just write a schema definition in a easy XML format and Metabase will install it for you regardless of each of the supported DBMS you are using. Metabase will also handle alterations to the schema after you install your database and without disturbing the data that was inserted on it. You just need to alter the schema definition and Metabase will detect and apply the changes. These are just a few examples of the capabilities of Metabase. Then there is a miriad of ready to use components that are just awaiting my free time to be documented. These comprise things like interchanging data between forms and databases, display database results in paged tables, etc... Don't get scared with Metabase main manual document. All you need to do to get started is to read the tutorial document first. The main manual document is just for reference of the concepts and commands that you may want to learn to understand details of operation. Regards, Manuel Lemos Web Programming Components using PHP Classes. Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/?user=mlemos@acm.org -- E-mail: mlemos@acm.org URL: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ PGP key: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ManuelLemos.pgp --