[ale] PHP SQL parser (was: DB abstraction for PHP)

[J.M. Taylor]

John,

There aren't any problems as such, it works great for what it does.  It's
just not really a true abstraction, ie, there's no intelligence behind
what PEAR does with your sql statement.

Example: you write $query = "some query with nested subqueries";

Well that works great for Oracle and maybe OK with some others.  But you
try to pass it to MySQL and MySQL just stares blankly at you.  So you have
to do your own pre-processing and set up different scripts with different,
database-specific queries.  And of course PEAR expects different
parameters for whatever database you're making a connection to, so you
have to handle that somehow (probably in a set of wrapper functions that
set up the connection and load the db-specific queries).  And then your
main scripts have to be smart enough to know what db and wrappers to use,
and how to handle the different output from the different datbases.

So it's not undoable.  I've used PEAR and my own lighter versions for many
projects because a true abstraction simply isn't out there.  From my
perspective, it's easier to write much lighter wrappers and call them as
needed if you're going to have to do all that garbage anyway, you load far
fewer lines of PHP for each time you need to talk to the database. I don't
think PEAR is a terribly efficient way of doing things, but it certainly
works.

Sorry for the long rant. I've been trying to find a solution to this for
awhile, I think the real solution is going to be to write a SQL parser.  
There is a pay product out there that I saw in linuxjournal one day, but
what it actually *does* or how much it costs, I have no idea (and the
name, of course, escapes me).  I can try to look it up if you're
interested.

Ciao
jenn



John Wells said:
> Jenn,
>
> Could you outline briefly the problems you've run into with PearDB?
>
> Thanks for the help!
>
> John
>
> J.M. Taylor said:
>> John,
>>
>> I've been looking for about a year and have yet to find what you're
>> talking about...you want true abstraction.  PEAR doesn't do much IMHO.
>>
>> So far what I've done is write a wrapper script that handles the db
>> connection based on a paramter, and returns your result in an array of
>> assoc arrays.  In *theory* it works great (and it sure does make
>> calling the DB easier) but in practice I've never tried it on vastly
>> different DBs and frankly have no knowledge of how cross-db my SQL
>> statements would really be. :(
>>
>> What you (and I) really want is a PHP SQL parser.  It's on my list of
>> things to write but it's so far away that I'm afraid I can't be of any
>> more help than to offer the wrapper script.
>>
>> Anyone know of any other resourses for this?
>>
>> Jenn
>>
>>
>> John Wells said:
>>> Can anyone suggest a very mature db abstraction solution for PHP?
>>> I'd like to support at the very least Oracle, MySql, and optionally
>>> Postgres.  SqlServer would be nice as well, but not a requirement.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ale mailing list
>>> Ale at ale.org
>>> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale



_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale