I’m currently doing the PHP & MySQL Web Development for Beginners course (MySQLi), however, last night I decided to check out the Jump Start PHP book by Callum Hopkins and noticed that the code examples provided are a bit different. I found out about PDO and got me thinking whether it would be a better career choice to learn it instead of MySQLi.
I was trying to find out about the main differences between the two while reading people’s opinions about them but I’m still unsure which one to choose. I know that PDO allows you to code for multiple database drivers and reusing code is easier, however, people say that MySQLi is easier to learn and understand (?), more efficient and as secure as PDO (?). In regards to PDO’s compatibility with multiple database drivers, what kind of situation would require a programmer to need to switch to a different database? Could those situations present themselves multiple times in a programmer’s career path?
I was hoping someone could shed some light about the two and what would make PDO/MySQLi a better career choice over the other.
IMHO only if you’re coming from experience using deprecated mysql_ and want to avoid OOP.
That’s debatable. I think it’s always possible to write inefficient / insecure code. Nothing it itself will magically take care of all problems for you. But some let you tackle certain problems easier I guess.
I’m actually still a computer science student but I wanted to learn PHP because I want to do web development. For now, just focus on small personal projects, stuff like that. However, I want to make sure I learn what is best, must appropriate and future-proved. I don’t want to spend my time learning something that will eventually loose popularity/momentum. Someone told me that PDO is the more modern way of dealing with databases, is Object oriented and will eventually become the only way of working with databases.
Also, is there a reason for you to stick with MySQL or was it just a matter of MySQL being the first database driver you learned? Are there any advantages/disadvantages of using any one in particular?
Actually the first database I worked with was MS Access. with VB code.
But when I decided to have a “real” website (not AOL Hometown or Geocities) it was a LAMP host so I learned PHP with MySQL. At the time, mysql_ was about all that I could deal with as a newbie.
I’ve had a long road getting away from thinking procedural after many years of writing it, so moving to mysqli_ that also has procedural style was easier. But over the years I’ve slowly got a bit of OOP-think and when I needed to work with SQLite I began tackling PDO.
I can’t say if one db is better than another in any particular way AFAIK with my limited experience. The only reason I mostly worked (and still do) with MySQL is because that’s what my host has.
The are syntax and datatype differences but AFAIK they all perform about the same at the scale of use I’ve put them through.
I’ll give my .05 cents (it used to be .02 cents, but due to inflation )
I started off using mysqli, but notice a few books I that I bought on PHP were using PDO and various people posting that PDO was what they were using and recommend PDO. So I decided to give PDO a whirl and when I starting learning OOP that is really when things started to click. For me now PDO is second nature and easier to remember than a bunch of ? marks that mysqli lends itself to. As being more efficient I think any code a person writes can be efficient or inefficient, it depends on what type of programmer you are.
I was a last holdout with mysql functions, I made 4 attempts with mysqli and/or PDO but it seemed too complicated.
I installed the latest PHP distro in localhost and got the dreaded mysql functions depreciated message.
I made one final go of it and the information was overwhelming.
PDO is a wrapping library for multiple database drivers, including mysqli. So when you are using PDO you are using mysqli and so the security vulnerabilities are more or less the same. Injection can occur with either if you forgo the prepare statement/execute paradigm. PDO is ever so slightly slower than mysqli, but if the difference in speed between the two is important to you then you’re using the wrong programming language to begin with and would be better off using C.
C is harder to develop with, but it’s “closer to the metal” and therefore more efficient than PHP in almost all use cases if the code is written efficiently. The tradeoff is it takes more time to develop a C program. As a rule of thumb developer time is more valuable than computer processor time. If how fast the program can execute is a real concern for any reason, C is the way to go.
Codifing in C for web development I really think is a madness. If you are evaluating others languages, take a look at python or ruby for example (What about HHVM )
This two points bellow I think it was amazing:
PHP >= 5.5
Native opcode implemented, increase performance a lot;
Zephir
Concepted by Phalcon developers as an hybrid language;
You can use to put some part of your project as a PHP library and improve your project load time, for example;
You will also need experience in C programming as PHP is written entirely in C.
So PHP is kind of a “middle-man”.
Not to worry much though. For most sites the size, resource use, and amount of traffic are more than adequately handled, Only when you get to the extreme that it starts to be the bottle-neck.
Typically the underlaying culprit of noticeable performance issues tends to be interacting with a persistent storage system like MySQL. On high traffic php based sites there are most likely going to be several caching layers implemented like memcache, and varnish. Those will certainly circumvent any short comings of interpreted code when implemented properly. Especially if you can get away with running a static cache for high volume pages.
All and all I wouldn’t worry to much about performance in the beginning of learning php. Performance tuning is a very wide and vast topic that requires multiple technologies to get it right for supporting high traffic web presences. Not something you really need to know when just starting out.
I might go as far to say you’re falling victim to over engineering unless outages and performance are a common problem with the site being ran. There is something to be said for anticipating scale problems in the beginning but again that is a more advanced topic not really appropriate for someone just starting out imo.
That being said if the book is teaching mysqli use mysqli. Once you understand the basic concepts of interacting with mysql through mysqli_* functions transitioning to PDO isn’t a huge leap.
In correction, PDO (specifically, its MySQL driver) does not wrap MySQLi. For the above quoted text, substitute MySQL Native Driver (mysqlnd) for mysqli. mysqlnd is the recommended driver that is available to be used by both PDO (MySQL), MySQLi, and the retired MySQL extension. Before mysqlnd there was libmysqlclient, which is still an option to be used by any of the database extensions above, but is not recommended. Both libmysqlclient and mysqlnd are low-level libraries that are used by the various PHP extensions that talk to MySQL.
The Overview of the MySQL PHP drivers PHP manual pages give great explanations of the terminology (what is a connector, driver, extension…?) and short summaries of PDO (MySQL), MySQLi, and the historical MySQL extension.
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