Playing with PHP Data Objects (PDO)

Just migrated the database access code of my PHP sample page from the original (and old) mysql_* functions to PHP Data Objects (PDO). Some advantages of making this change:

• You can write more general code because your application is not tied to a specific PHP database extension library.
• PDO is similar to other database APIs, such as ADO or JDBC, so it was easier for me to write code in PDO than using, say, the PHP MySQL API.
• You can use PHP try … catch blocks, so you can remove the clutter related to testing the return flag of a function. After instantiating a PDO class, $pdo, call $pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION) as shown in Error Handling section. Note that as per this comment, exceptions may only work in the database driver supports it.

As per the PDO introduction, PDO is not a complete data abstraction layer. You can't simply connect to another vendor's DBMS and expect your code to work. For instance, you still have to write SQL queries that the DBMS can understand. One way to tackle that is to encapsulate all database-specific information into a class and call methods to obtain queries for that specific database.