ADOdb is very efficient primarily because abstraction is kept to a
minimum -- i.e. the adodb methods called immediately call the native PHP
function (e.g. $rs->MoveNext() calls mysql_fetch_array() immediately);
That's something PHPLIB::DB also does.
Sure, I was just suggesting that the benchmarks may not always be the most reliable. E.g. there are lots of ways of fetching results and some may be less abstracted than others. Anyway, I certainly believe there is room for speed improvement in PEAR::(M)DB, but I'm also using MDB in a pretty big, very db-intensive environment and have been happy with performance. Swapping in ADOdb at one point really didn't make a noticeable difference (it should be noted, however, that I was using ADOdb's pear compatibility library which would be slower than "native" ADOdb).