Might the MySQLi get removed in future because of PDO?

[Mudsaf]

Hello, i'm wondering that is there possibility to MySQLi extension get removed since there is PDO with way more Database supporting and only a little slower.

 

Is the PDO new future of Database coding? If not why should i learn MySQLi instead of PDO straight away?

 

MySQLi: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqli.php

PDO: http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php

 

Reply what you think about this topic.

[justsomeguy]

PDO is more flexible, you should use PDO for any new application where the actual database might change. If you switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL, for example, and you used mysqli, then you have to write code. If you use PDO then you just change the connection and driver information. That being said, the mysqli extension is not difficult to learn, there's not much to it. Most of the work with databases is designing the structure and writing the actual SQL statements, not learning the API. The APIs have fairly standard capabilities, just slightly different syntax.

[Mudsaf]

So do you think that MySQLi might get removed in future because of PDO?

[justsomeguy]

I doubt any database-specific extension will be completely removed. It might happen in 10 years or so, but I don't see any plans to do that. The mysql extension hasn't even been removed yet, it's been deprecated since 2004 though.

[Mudsaf]

Well another question, do you really see difference between PDO queries & MySQLi queries?

[justsomeguy]

If you're writing queries for PDO then you should try and make yourself aware of which features are only supported by MySQL, and avoid using those features. Try to stick to standard SQL that doesn't use any database-specific functions or features. If you can do that then your application will be portable across database systems. You may lose some performance. The tradeoff with using something like mysqli is that you can specifically target MySQL and therefore optimize your queries specifically for it. In that case you sacrifice portability though.