RE: [PEAR] DB vs MDB

> From: Densial Edmonds [mailto:Densial.Edmonds@TheWebConduit.com] > Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 11:20 PM > I am a newbie (very much so) and have a quick question, sorry if this is > the > wrong forum or if I have it all backwards, I am evaluating PHP at the > moment. I had a look at some of the documentation and explanations of DB > and > MDB on the pear.php web site and came to the conclusion that MDB looks > more > functional and (generally) a better database abstraction layer, but DB has > way more downloads and it looks like some of the other database "bits" are > DB orientated. Can someone tell me what they think of the differences > between DB and MDB and what they think I should maybe use? The main differences are as follows: DB: is the long established database layer in PEAR. It has support for all major RDBMS and is packaged with PHP since version 4.3 (officially atleast). It focuses on providing a common API and not so much on providing true abstraction MDB: is not as long lived and doesn't have support for as many RDBMS backends yet. It provides additional features for true abstraction, like type conversion, schema support and database management methods. A good article (I wrote it ;-) ) which covers MDB and explains some of the difference can be found here: http://www.php-mag.net/itr/online_artikel/show.php3?id=283&nodeid=114 Please also check the archives of this mailinglist. Regards, Lukas