Chapter 8: Database Abstraction Layers

Overview

Most of the enterprise-level applications you will build with PHP will at some point need to interact with a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server. Many of the components in the toolkit presented in this book have some obvious integration points with a database. Unfortunately, PHP's data interaction functions are very platform specific.

For example, to connect to a MySQL database, the PHP function is called mysql_connect.To connect to a PostgreSQL database, the function is pg_connect. The Oracle and ODBC APIs have their own names. The various database functions are similar, though not identical, across the different platforms. As a result, any change to the database platform on which your application runs will require changing all the database function calls. To help resolve this problem, a number of different open source and commercial projects have endeavored to create a unified set of data access functions that can work with any database. The main idea behind doing this is to allow applications to easily change the database they run on. In theory, you should be able to easily change from PostgreSQL to MySQL or any other platform.

In reality, because of the differences between the different SQL dialects and the different levels of support for the SQL specification and the proprietary SQL extensions used by most databases, real portability between databases is neither a reality nor a necessity for most large-scale enterprise applications. However, because the components in this toolkit are designed to be generic and completely reusable between different applications, ease of portability between database platforms is a requirement for the components.

To make it easy for toolkit components to be reused between different applications, running on different platforms, this chapter will explore the creation of a database abstraction layer and take a brief look at some of the more popular database abstraction layer projects that exist.

You'll also learn about an important design pattern called Singleton. The Singleton Design Pattern allows you to create exactly one instance of a particular class, and no more than one. This is useful when you have something like a database connection and you don't want to allow the application to be creating lots of these connections during a single page request.



Professional PHP5 (Programmer to Programmer Series)
Professional PHP5 (Programmer to Programmer Series)
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 182
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