MySQLi is an improved extension introduced in PHP5 to work with advanced MySQL features like prepared statements and stored procedures. From a performance point of view, MySQLi is much better than a MySQL extension. Also this extension offers completely object oriented interfaces to work with a MySQL database which was not available before PHP5. But keep in mind that if your MySQL version is at least 4.1.3 or above, you will get it working.
So what are the major improvements? Let's have a look first:
Improved performance over MySQL extensions
Flexible OO and Non OO interface
Advantage over new MySQL objects
Ability to create compressed connections
Ability to connect over SSL
Support for Prepared Statements
Support for Stored Procedure (SP)
Support for better replication and transaction
We will look into some of these features in the following examples. But of course we are not going for anything introductory to MySQL, because that is out of scope for this book. We will just...