Re: More PHP DB abstraction layer stuff

> On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Dennis Gearon wrote:
>
> In perl with DBI:
>
> $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id = ?");
> $sth->execute($idvalue);
>
> I didn't even know it was possible in PHP. I've never used it before.

Indeed the Perl DBI is quite a bit more solid than the PHP "abstractions". The
syntax is there in PEAR::db:

$db->getall("SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE id = ?", array($idvalue));

but there are a few problems compared to the perl DBI:

a) separating the prepare and the execute is possible but doesn't seem to work
right. If you have two cursors active at the same time it seems to get very
confused.

b) it seems to actually do the substitution itself of the values into the
query which is better than doing it myself but still a lot worse than
giving it to the database out of band. if there's a bug in the PEAR::db
quoting it could still create a security hole.

c) (b) implies it can't be caching prepared query handles so the database has
to parse the query each time. This is a huge lose on big queries, and it's
one of the big advantages to using placeholders other than the security
issues.

d) having to type array() every time is a bit annoying.

--
greg