PDO intro on SitePoint

Well, it's nice to have publicity, but the SitePoint intro by David has a few factoids (and user comments) that are slightly "off", so here are some comments of my own to bolster his post:

• PDO is Beta now, not alpha (if you're running PHP 5.1b3 that is)
• Use pdo_drivers() if you want to see what drivers are available. The dl() function is not guaranteed to work in a lot of SAPI.
• David missed out on my article on PDO for IBM developerWorks, which is a bit more up to date than the OTN article.
• PDO is all C-based native code, and will, one day in the future, eventually replace the traditional database extensions.
• PDO is data access abstraction rather than database abstraction. They are not the same thing; data access abstraction is making the way you get at the data the same, whereas database abstraction is making databases look the same. Pretty big difference.

Remember: we're relying on you to get out there and play with PDO to uncover any bugs that might be lurking; it works fine for the test cases we have. One of the rules for good QA is to have people other than the people that built something do the testing; they're sure to use things in ways that the architect didn't consider on the first run. Please try it out and report any bugs/strange behaviour to bugs.php.net--Thank you!