[CLUE-Tech] Why PHP rules!

[Christopher Wiegand]

Also, if you ever have migrated ASP (or even a real VB app) from using ODBC
and/or DAO and/or ADO from Access to MS-SQL, you will know that you *still*
have to at least verify all of your SQL statements, as MS-SQL uses % instead
of *, some of the field types act a little differently (read: you can search
an Access Memo field but not a MS-SQL Text field). You will have to do some
work anyways... :( Also, from what I have seen, ODBC isn't a nice API to work
with, so that's why there probably isn't alot of built-in support for most
languages.

> > Now, there is one thing left, that MS has actually done well.  ODBC, 
> > although limited is a good idea.  Give one way to talk to databases that
> 
> > covers the basics, and write drivers to do this with any database. 
> There 
> > is a UNIX ODBC, but I have not seen much support for this.  PERL does
> this 
> > well, with DBI, but a general purpose one would be best.  Does anyone
> know 
> > of anything?   It would be nice to do development with one database, and
> 
> > then switch if needed.
> 
> I've never been much of an ODBC fan but there are some wrappers that allow
> for this to happen under PHP. One of them is: 
> 
> http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB
> 
> You are correct that Perl does do this with the DBI interface, but I have
> never seen this switch databases well. I recently worked on switching from
> mSQL to MySQL (mSQL is the spawn of something very evil...) using the
> DBI. While our scripts didn't change all that much, our database schema
> was crippled by having to stay with the mSQL formats (MySQL is much more
> powerful, the only thing I like better is PostgreSQL for features).
> 
> The reality of it is that if you switch databases you should probably
> think about just modularizing your code so that you have one part that
> handles all of your database connections/retrieving you data and another
> part that does nothing but work on displaying your data. Smart design over
> depending on features.

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