Lester Caine wrote:

>
> Ive been using ADOdb as a proper database abstraction layer, and there
> is a lite
> version of that, as well as a couple of alternatives. But PDO is
> probably a dead
> end as far as database abstraction. It can't even do just the data bit
> as you
> have found ;)

Ok, that's a clear and definite answer. Thank you! I'll stop
any PDO efforts immediately :-)

(This morning, after the first start of the browser, I actually
got some data rows out of the Firebird database by using my PDO
code from yesterday, but on the second try: segmentation fault
again...)

I have now installed ADOdb (there even was a Gentoo installation
package), and it runs without problems (at least with Firebird -
not tried with mySQL yet). Thank you very much for your hint
about ADOdb - I wouldn't have found it myself apparently (it's
not mentioned on the www.php.net website at all, is it?).

So I just have to struggle with the details (the documentation
is a bit... ehm... messy?!) -
- there is very few information about closing/freeing things
(database connections, SQL statements - is there an "unprepare"?,
result sets and so on). I guess PHP does all this "automagically",
but from other programming languages I'm used to write "close" in
my code when I wrote "open" somewhere before...
- error/exception handling is still a mystery to me. For example,
when the database cannot be opened, the following code

try {
$this->Database=ADONewConnection($dsn);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo "Open error! Reason: ".$e->getMessage();
}

returns this output:

Warning: ibase_connect() [function.ibase-connect]: Access to database "..." is denied by server
administrator in /usr/share/php5/adodb/drivers/adodb-ibase.inc.php on line 74

Open error! Reason: firebird error: [0: Access to database "..." is denied by server administrator ]
in CONNECT(...)

So I get _two_ error messages. If I use "error_reporting(0);" before,
the error message does get suppressed, but the exception seems to be
gone away as well. For now, I'm just using
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_WARNING & ~E_NOTICE);
which suppresses the ibase_connect warning but leaves the exception
intact - but I'm not quite sure if that's good programming practice...

Anyway, ADOdb seems to be the database interface I was looking for -
thanks again for your help!

-Matt


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