Re:DB2 Documentatin (Unified ODBC Dri vers)

Daniel Beckham: >Is there anyone here who is familiar with the DB2 support? I just added >some information to the installation section of the manual, but there >really isn't any documentation that explains how to use it. I believe that >I can add some useful information for this, but I'm not sure how it should >actually be added. Personally, I think here should be aliases from the >odbc_* functions to db2_ functions.. but I'm on the doc list.. not dev list... The ODBC interface is just fine, we are using Netscape Enterprise and iPlanet web servers on Solaris with db2 as database server with php via ODBC. We've used this for a few months in production systems now. Once a first framework is built for opening connections and sending queries to the database, the same framework can be used for most applications. The only thing missing in the documentation as I see is a basic framework for ODBC database access. Specific to db2 is that it has a very long (over 1 second) connection time, so the persistent connections are an absolute must. If you can't use persistent conections for any reason and need good response times, then db2 via PHP isn't really an option, use Net.data or another database. >Should there be a actual db2 (and other supported databases) section that >explains some details about how db2 is supported and then links over to the >odbc section? Should there just be a unified odbc driver section that >explains each database that uses the driver? Perhaps a short section giving examples of frameworks for connection and queries for the major databases. >Any thoughts on this? How about you guys on the dev team that read this >list? How about having aliased functions so that we can actually have a >full doc section for each of these databases? I think aliasing ODBC functions for individual databases isn't really a good thing, it may confuse end users as to which API the database is using if they run into trouble shooting. It's easy to see in db2's case if PHP cannot connect due to ODBC support not having been installed, but if the functions start db2_ end users may think that PHP is using the db2 native API. I'm sure the same is true for other databases with ODBC support. On a general note, the combination db2->enterprise server->php works VERY well on solaris platforms, all versions and the performance with persistent connections is excellent. -Ant Whitehead Sysadmin Swedish Social Security Ministry