I was looking for a good out of the box library or class I could use as a singleton to manage database interactions in one of my PHP projects, and after rejecting Pear MDB2, PDO, ADODB and dbFacile I came across just what I was looking for: DbSimple, which satisfies all the requirements I have:

• Easy to use interface functions
• Conditional queries, escaped arguments for secure queries and prevention of database injection attacks
• Error handling, connection management
• Open source license

It looks daunting at first because the package comes with numerous files, but the usage is quite simple after you upload it; something like this is enough to get started:

require_once('DbSimple/Generic.php');
$DB = DbSimple_Generic::connect("mysql://user:pass@localhost/db");
$DB->query( "DROP TABLE table");

A feature which I probably won’t use as much is the transactionality–you can open, commit, and rollback mysql transactions to bundles your queries together.

3 Responses to “PHP MySql Database Class / Library”

1. mcguillan says:

   1/13/2009 at 4:04 am

   Have you ever tried the Zend Framework? It also has a very nice DB handling and some more easy to use features…

   Reply
2. links for 2009-01-14 | grant watson says:

   1/14/2009 at 5:01 pm

   [...] PHP MySql Database Class / Library — Elliott C. Back A good out of the box library or class I could use as a singleton to manage database interactions in one of my PHP projects. (tags: php database programming) [...]

   Reply
3. Phil says:

   1/15/2009 at 1:42 am

   Why did you not like ADODB?

   Reply