Book Image

Learning PHP Data Objects

By : Dennis Popel
Book Image

Learning PHP Data Objects

By: Dennis Popel

Overview of this book

PDO is lighter, faster, and more powerful than existing PHP data abstraction interfaces. PDO is a common interface to different databases that must be used with a database-specific PDO driver to access a particular database server: the PDO extension does not provide a database abstraction by itself; it doesn't rewrite SQL, emulate missing database features, or perform any database functions using by itself. It performs the same role as other classic database abstraction layers such as ODBC and JDBC: it's a query abstraction layer that abstracts the mechanism for accessing a database and manipulating the returned records; each database driver that implements the PDO interface can also expose database-specific features as regular extension functions. ¬ PDO ships with PHP 5.1, and is available as an extension for PHP 5.0; it requires the new object-oriented features of PHP 5, and cannot run with earlier versions of PHP.This book will teach you how to use the PDO, including its advanced features. Readers need to be aware of the basics of data abstraction and should be familiar with PHP.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we examined how PDO handles errors and introduced exceptions. Also, we investigated the sources of errors and saw how to counter them.

Our sample application was extended with some real-world administration functionality that uses data validation and is secured against SQL injection attacks. Of course, they should also allow database modifications only to certain users based on login names and passwords. However, this is beyond the scope of this book.

In the next chapter, we will look at another very important aspect of PDO and database programming in general—using prepared statements. We will see how our administration pages can be simplified with their help, leading to less code and better maintenance.