RE: [PEAR] Use DB or MDB?

> From: Merritt, Dave [mailto:Dave.Merritt@ArvinMeritor.com] > Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 1:37 AM > To: Pear General (E-mail) > Subject: [PEAR] Use DB or MDB? > > All, > > I'm starting to use PEAR, in particular I'm interested in using it for the > database abstraction. I had planned on using DB but someone informed me > that development has stopped on DB and MDB will be replacing DB. Is this > correct, and if so, is MDB ready for everyday usage? If not, which > package > should I consider using? PEAR DB is still actively maintained. However features are not added a lot anymore these days, mainly because PEAR DB really well what it set out to do. PEAR MDB was launched as an effort to widen the scope of what PEAR has to offer in terms of abstraction and will at some point replace PEAR DB. Currently MDB is pretty stable and I use it in production for around 9 months now. I would not however claim that MDB has reached the same level of maturity that DB has. The other draw back is that MDB currently still lacks drivers. However this is going to change pretty soon as we will add oracle, frontbase, querysim, informix and interbase/firebirds drivers to the 1.2 release which will probably happen in april. Maybe even a mssql/Sybase driver. This would mean the only driver that is seriously lacking is an odbc driver (any takers?). The other thing where MDB is lacking a bit is in documentation. In API is really similar and there are now a lot of sources to learn about MDB (www.backendmedia.com/MDB/docs) but a single document would be great. So what does MDB offer? Basically it brings the abstraction to a new level by introducing datatype abstraction and xml based schema management. But you can read all the details at the above URL. Regards, Lukas