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)

Prepared Statements


A prepared statement is a template for executing one or more SQL queries against the database. The idea behind prepared statements is that, with queries that use the same syntax but different values, it is much faster to pre-process the syntax once and then execute it several times using different parameters. Consider the following task. We have to insert the names of several new authors into our database. Of course, we can use command line client or the add author page we recently created, but we decide to use a PHP script.

Let's assume that the authors to be added are kept in a PHP array:

$authors = array(
array(
'firstName' => 'Alexander',
'lastName' => 'Dumas',
'bio' => 'Alexandre Dumas was a French writer, best known for his
numerous historical novels of high adventure which have
made him one of the most widely read French authors in
the world.'),
array(
'firstName' => 'Ivan',
'lastName' => 'Franko',
'bio' => 'Ivan Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer...